ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses an uncontroversial example of control: rules and regulations. It examines an aspect of the use of language to control the behaviour of other people, by analysing two printed regulatory texts. The rules announced in the first text were drawn up by a member of a group for the communal benefit of that group. The group in question is a swimming club for children and their parents, run by the parents. The effectiveness of the club rules depends on its addressees' sensing that the text belongs to the type of incontrovertible verbal authority which is so strikingly represented by our second text. However, there is one important respect in which the rules depart from the extreme model of the regulations. The regulations have been drawn up primarily to create the atmosphere of a community in which authority is absolute if covert, and in which individual action is discouraged, quiet and stasis enjoined.
