This essay is an update, ten years after the publication of the original article on the topic (Wilson, 1996). In that interval, the field of Pragmatics has not seen major developments specifically in the study of authority. This might be due to the way ‘authority’ is commonly conceptualised in relation to power. From a standard social psychology perspective, authority is one form (or sub-set) of power. However, the concept of ‘authority’ is more complex, and will be defined here as a form of legitimation, legally, culturally, and interactionally constructed, that comes to be worked out within everyday life as linguistic, pragmatic, practice. In this sense authority issues in pragmatics are much more pervasive than is normally acknowledged. It is discussed how power often gains attention, rather than a recognition that power is frequently the linguistic working out of particular authority claims. There is frequently an implicit recognition of this claim in that one often finds the terms power and authority used together, and for some scholars the two seem almost synonymous. In this contribution, the argument is that the language of law, medicine, and education emerges from selectional choices that are employed in establishing relationships of power and status against a background of conventional authority claims.