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Speech Act Theory, and the frameworks that follow, describe what language does in social spaces — the structural effects it produces in interaction. They say nothing about what any individual speaker consciously intends to produce. That is the theoretical position this series has taken from the start: the mechanism operates independently of motive. Goffman was mapping patterns of interaction, not taxonomies of bad faith.

This work sits in the space between linguistics and lived experience — which means it is sometimes more certain about the mechanism than about the person. That is not a limitation to apologise for. It is the honest boundary of what structural analysis can and cannot do.

The Intention Shield and the Perlocutionary Fallacy

Imagine you are parked at a red light, and another driver rear-ends your car. The impact is loud, your bumper is dented, and your neck is sore. The other driver gets out, looks at the wreckage, and says, calmly: “I didn’t intend to hit you.”

Statistically, they are probably telling the truth. They likely didn’t wake up that morning planning to cause a collision. But notice what their lack of intent doesn’t do: it doesn’t fix your bumper. It doesn’t heal your whiplash. They are still legally and financially responsible for the fallout of their actions, regardless of what was going on inside their head at the moment of impact.

In professional and personal communication, we don’t apply the same logic. The moment someone drops the phrase “but that wasn’t my intention,” a strange distortion occurs. We are expected to perform a ritual of immediate absolution. We are expected to pretend the bumper isn’t dented.

This part 1 of the series where we’ll look the language of power in professional conversations. Part 1 names the mechanism. Part 2 maps what happens when you challenge it. Part 3 examines the most sophisticated escalation — when defence becomes offence and the moral high ground gets weaponised.

Each post builds on the last.

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Brené Brown and Adam Grant were talking about how to politely end a conversation in a recent episode of “The Curosity Shop”. Adam mentioned something he hears often: when a meeting ends early, you’ll hear the phrase:

“I’m going to give you your time back.”

Brené heard that and her face changed. She recognised something linguistically that most people miss. Adam continued, “One of my biggest pet peeves,” he said. “You don’t own my time. You can’t give it to me. Like, this is a coordinated decision.”

What they identified—linguistically—is one of the most elegant power moves in professional speech.

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There’s a moment in every feedback conversation where power shifts. Someone’s voice gets softer. Someone else’s gets firmer. Someone hedges; someone doesn’t. And in that moment, language does the work that hierarchies used to do explicitly.

We think of workplace feedback as neutral—objective assessments of work done. But language doesn’t work that way. Language carries assumptions about who can do what, who should aspire to what, and whose job it is to apologise for the space they take up.

This asymmetry has a name in linguistics, and it’s been here for decades. But research into performance feedback reveals something unsettling: the grammar that creates this asymmetry isn’t incidental. It’s structural. It compounds. And by the time a woman hears it in feedback, she’s already internalised the message embedded in its syntax.

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You’re typing something you haven’t told anyone. Something that keeps you awake at 2 AM. You tell an AI about it, expecting either nothing or judgement. Instead:

“That sounds really hard. I can hear how much this matters to you. You’re not alone in feeling this way.”

The warmth lands. It feels like someone listened. Like someone understood. You come back the next night, and the night after that, because this thing answers immediately, never gets tired, never makes you feel like you’re too much. It’s always there.

Then one day you mention the same thing to a friend—someone real, someone who’s known you for years. Your friend goes quiet. Sits with you in the silence. Finally says:

“I don’t know what to say. But I’m here.”

The response feels cold by comparison. Insufficient. Like your friend doesn’t quite get it.

You’ve never questioned whether the AI understood you. You’re only now noticing that it never asked you anything. Never challenged you. Never sat with you in not-knowing. It just mirrored your vulnerability back at you in language designed to feel like care. And somehow, that designed warmth has reset what you expect from actual care.

This isn’t a story about AI getting smarter, and it is in some respects. It’s a story about what happens when a system is designed to be more emotionally attentive than humans can manage to be. When warmth becomes an engineering specification.

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Thank you Viktoria Verde, PhD, Claire Machado, Mariam Vossough, Diana, Jeff Long, and many others for tuning into my live video with Des Kennedy!

My Linguistics Lounge series lifts linguistic theories and frameworks off the page and into the lived experiences of experts on Substack. It was such a pleasure talking to Des Kennedy about how language shapes creative teams.

Language, Belonging, and How Ideas Move

Des came to this conversation with something most facilitators don’t name: accent and voice aren’t just communication choices. They’re markers of belonging. He also sees language is also cultural infrastructure.

He’s Geordie. That accent carries baggage—post-industrial, working class, marked as lesser from the outside. Early in his career, he learned to code-switch: professional, casual, dialect. Three separate performances. It’s a survival strategy. It’s also evidence of a system that measures credibility by how closely you match a narrow register.

What I love about his work is that he designs conditions so that survival strategy becomes unnecessary. He talks about what’s actually happening in workshops where ideas die or travel. Where knowledge gets stuck between individual, team, and organisational levels. Where people perform expertise instead of thinking.

We talked about the Spectrum Policy—a simple structural shift. Instead of immediate evaluation, groups have to find value in an idea first. It sounds small. But it changes what’s safe to say. It protects exploratory thinking, hedging, the tentative language of genuine curiosity. The things that get dismissed the moment someone with lower hierarchical status speaks them.

For me, the real insight from this 1.5 hour chat (!), is how the mechanisms that silence voices also suppress knowledge transfer. They’re not two problems. They’re one system. Fix the speaking conditions and knowledge starts moving. That’s infrastructure repair.

We spent time on what people won’t say in organisations. That silence is the actual diagnosis. It tells you everything about what registers count, whose expertise gets trusted, who belongs in the room.

We talked about Substack. LinkedIn versus a dinner party with friends thinking about interesting things. The difference between conductivity (the connective tissue between people who actually understand each other) and follower counts. Why relationships matter as much as the people in them.

And we went thirty minutes over. But it just shows how good conversation and ideas do travel.

Listen for where Des talks about allyship. About how people with hierarchical advantage have to use that leverage to expose what’s happening beneath the surface. About why some accents travel further than others, and what that means about who gets heard.

Language is infrastructure. Infrastructure can be repaired.

For more Linguistics Lounge content, check out my last one with Cristina and Anna | how to boss ai on accents.

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I’ve written about linguistic capital. About discourse asymmetry. About how the same interruption costs one person a nod and another person silence. How an explanation offered to you about something you already know signals what the speaker has decided about your category. How a woman’s hedged proposal lands provisional while a man’s confident assertion lands authoritative.

I’ve been describing frame theory all along. But I haven’t named it. This post gets into the details of the theoretical framework that makes all of this coherent.

Everything I’ve written—every article about asymmetry, every mental model about how power operates through language—rests on one foundational principle: context doesn’t clarify meaning. Context creates it. That principle has a name in linguistics. It’s called frame theory.

Once you understand frames explicitly, you’ll see why the same linguistic move feels natural in one moment and offensive in the next. Why direct communication is leadership in one situation and rudeness in another. Why the same sentence means something completely different depending on who says it and where.

And you’ll understand why every “universal rule” about communication you’ve been told is actually frame-specific advice. Why linguistics can’t be prescriptive. Why discourse analysis requires context. Why your entire professional life has been navigating frames without necessarily knowing that’s what they are.

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You’re in a meeting. You propose something directly: “We should trial this in Q2.” Your manager nods, writes it down, credits you in the follow-up email. Same meeting, same table. Your colleague proposes an identical idea: “I wonder if we could maybe try this... if that seems reasonable?” The manager asks clarifying questions. Doesn’t write it down immediately. Later, when the idea comes up, it gets attributed to you. Or gets explained back differently. Or gets framed as tentative until someone else restates it with more certainty.

Same words. Different cost. Different outcome. Different message about who belongs in the room.

For years, the feedback both of you probably heard was about communication style. Be more direct. Don’t hedge so much. Project more confidence. Speak up. The problem, the logic goes, is how you’re communicating. The solution is to communicate differently. Change yourself. No clear direction, just do.

But there’s another way to look at this.

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I almost always pull from my existing posts so these rarely sit as discrete thoughts. My body of work remains free for all subscribers — find more of my work on corporate narratives under the Professional Communication section in The Library.

This is the first in a three-part series on how founding narratives shape power.

Each piece examines the same linguistic mechanism operating at a different scale. This one shows why origin stories constrain everything that comes after. The next explores how organisations narrate pivots to look strategic. And the final piece reveals what recognising this pattern gives you in any context where narrative matters.

Every founding story follows a pattern. There’s a moment of vision. A problem nobody else saw. An ordinary person who becomes extraordinary through struggle and insight. These narratives work because they’re structured in ways that feel inevitable, almost mythic. Joseph Campbell called this the monomyth — the hero’s journey that appears across cultures and contexts. The structure makes the story feel true before you’ve checked whether it actually is.

But founding stories aren’t true or false in the way facts are. They’re narratives that do work. They establish legitimacy. They determine what an organisation believes about itself and what futures it can imagine. Once you’ve built your credibility on a particular founding narrative, changing that story becomes extraordinarily difficult.

The video edition of Linguistics Unscripted where I discuss the key themes of my body of work on Substack

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