This study contributes to research on climate delay discourse with a scrutiny of climate whataboutism using membership categorization analysis. It builds upon a corpus of written and oral Danish conversations and debates about climate action and policy. The corpus includes actors representing the political sphere, interest groups, and private individuals. Climate whataboutism is designed by comparing two adaptable membership categories with one another: higher-emitting members of category X versus lower-emitting members of category Y, which speakers usually identify with. Speakers deploy various discursive and conversational resources to maximize the contrast between the two membership categories. Overall, climate whataboutism is produced to convey that local climate action is pointless, either in friendly situations where participants confirm one another, or in more antagonistic situations where participants defensively respond to arguments for taking action to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. The paper discusses why it is important to understand the mechanism of climate whataboutism and other kinds of delay discourse, not least when used among populations with very high carbon footprints per capita.
This study examines how presidential candidates construct multifaceted political identity through first-person singular pronouns in U.S. nomination acceptance speeches from 1944 to 2020. Employing Systemic Functional Linguistics as the analytical framework, the research identifies six functionally distinct roles of ‘I’ through corpus analysis of 2613 instances across 38 speeches, each role characterized by specific combinations of process type and temporal orientation. These roles address three rhetorical imperatives that candidates must navigate simultaneously: establishing authority, building credibility, and articulating vision. Analysis indicates the persistence of all six roles across the 76-year period, while their distribution remains closely comparable across party lines, suggesting they reflect demands intrinsic to the acceptance speech rather than partisan preference or individual style. This study provides a replicable approach for analyzing functional differentiation in pronoun usage, connecting grammatical features with communicative functions and identity construction in political discourse.
AI-driven surveillance technologies are marketed to Japanese convenience stores as solutions to rising crime. This article analyses the marketing materials of one technology company, Vaak, to examine how its system VaakEye is discursively constructed and how it legitimizes AI surveillance. The study is situated within a broader policy context in which the Japanese state promotes AI adoption through initiatives such as Society 5.0, while offering limited regulatory scrutiny. The analysis finds that AI is framed as an autonomous, ‘objective’, and common-sense solution, while customers and staff are represented as unreliable and suspicious, and therefore in need of technological oversight and behavioural managing. These representations draw on and reproduce ideologies of technological solutionism and safety and convenience, while obscuring the social and structural causes of crime. In so doing, they naturalize surveillance as necessary and desirable, and shift authority from human judgement to opaque algorithmic systems. This normalizes the expansion of data-driven monitoring in everyday life, contributing to a redistribution of power toward corporate actors and the infrastructures of surveillance capitalism. By framing these developments as inevitable and beneficial, opportunities for critical debate are foreclosed. This allows systems of behavioural control to become embedded in routine, everyday social practices like shopping.
This study examines how legitimation is interactionally constructed in US Senate Judiciary Committee (SJC) lower court nomination hearings. Drawing on legitimation theories and using Conversation Analysis, I argue that legitimation is accomplished not just through the content of senators’ talk, but also through its sequential positioning, specifically through having the “last word,” or through securing the final turn during hearing Q&A exchanges. Data includes video-recorded hearings from 2020 and 2022, with analysis focusing on instances where senators invoke the hearing’s time limits to conclude their questioning. These invocations enable senators to claim last-word turns while expressing critical evaluations of nominees and precluding their opportunities to respond, rebut, or contextualize the criticisms levied against them. In doing so, senators interactionally legitimize their own stances while delegitimizing nominees and their candidacy. By reconceptualizing legitimation as a sequential achievement, the study extends political communication and legitimation studies beyond monologic discourse to interactive formats.
