Drawing on a corpus of mock-jury deliberations from England and Wales comprising 94,000 words of transcript and 10 hours of video data from 132 participants, this study employs discourse analysis - specifically interactional analysis and narrative analysis - to examine how mock jurors interpret, negotiate, and recontextualise judicial directions. The analysis identifies two interactional manifestations of juror agency: adherence to judicial directions, and transgression through lay-knowledge-based reasoning. These orientations reveal how mock jurors construct and contest interactional roles, manage intra-group dynamics, and navigate the relationship between everyday knowledge and institutional authority. Rather than depicting jurors as passive recipients of legal expertise, the study foregrounds their evidential reasoning, moral judgement, and interpretive agency. The findings contribute to discourse studies by bridging institutional discourse, epistemic agency, and the revalorisation of lay knowledge within courtroom interaction.
This article examines how place is discursively constructed as an agent in talk about the exclusion of ethnic minority players in Australian grassroots cricket. Drawing on 40 semi-structured interviews with players and other stakeholders, we combine thematic analysis with Critical Discourse Analysis to identify the linguistic strategies used to construct place(s). We show how references to places of different degrees of granularity - from very specific to more general - shift responsibility for exclusion away from individuals and organisations, attributing it instead to geography. This discursive framing constructs exclusion as natural, inevitable, and beyond human intervention, thereby obscuring accountability and limiting the potential for meaningful change. By foregrounding references to place as a mechanism through which exclusion is normalised and justified, the article advances sociolinguistic understandings of how language shapes experiences of belonging and marginalisation in sport. The study highlights the need to critically examine spatial discourses when addressing inequalities in sport.
This critical discourse study analyses representations of gay couples in the 2011-2015 Chilean parliamentary debates on the civil-partnership law. Examining concordances for homosexual* and mismo sexo (same-sex), it identifies how gay people are portrayed as vulnerable, uncommon, or unexceptional. The analysis focuses on the competing representations of gay people as fundamentally different from (Set 1) or the same as (Set 2) heterosexual people. Set 1 reveals a homophobic stance built on three biologistic and traditionalist arguments: that marriage is an exclusively heterosexual institution, that gay couples cannot parent, and that they cannot constitute a family. Conversely, Set 2 challenges these by reframing family and reappropriating opponents' legitimation strategies (e.g. authority, morality). The study illuminates the linguistic mechanisms of exclusion during a pivotal period of legal transition, showing how equality proponents strategically redeployed discriminatory rhetoric to contest homophobia and advance social justice.
Gender equality is a central normative commitment in global governance, yet its discursive prominence within international political arenas remains uneven. This study examines how gender is constructed, prioritized, and integrated within the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) speeches over a 31-year period (1993-2023). Drawing on a large corpus of 171,901 speeches, and a total word count of 92.72 million, the analysis investigates three questions: (1) which themes dominate UNGA discourse, (2) how gender-related narratives have evolved over time, and (3) whether patterns of emphasis differ by speaker's gender. Adopting a discourse-analytic approach supported by large-scale text analysis, the study identifies 20 recurring thematic clusters. The findings show that while geopolitical concerns consistently dominate UNGA debates, gender equality and women's empowerment appear as secondary and often embedded themes rather than standalone priorities. Explicitly gender-focused agendas remain comparatively marginal, even as references to gender have increased over time. At the same time, women's participation in UNGA speeches has risen substantially, from 4.8% in 1993 to 35.5% in 2023, though this shift does not uniformly translate into greater discursive centrality for gender issues. These findings point to a tension between the institutional commitment to gender mainstreaming and the continued marginalization of gender as a distinct political priority. The study contributes to scholarship on discourse, power, and global governance by demonstrating how gender equality is incorporated into, yet diluted within, broader development narratives.
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.
