Abstract
When governments introduce controversial policies that many citizens disapprove of, officeholders increasingly use discursive legitimation strategies in their public communication to ward off blame. In this paper, we contribute to the study of blame avoidance in government social media communication by exploring how corpus-assisted discourse analysis helps to identify three types of common legitimations: self-defensive appeals to (1) personal authority of policymakers, (2) impersonal authority of rules or documents, and (3) goals or effects of policies. We use a specialised corpus of tweets by the Brexit department of the British government (42,618 words) which we analyse both qualitatively and quantitatively. We demonstrate how the analysis of lexical bundles that characterise each type of legitimation might provide a new avenue for identifying the presence, characteristics, and uses of these legitimations in larger datasets.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 1-21 |
| Number of pages | 21 |
| Journal | Discourse and Communication |
| Volume | 16 |
| Issue number | 5 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 30 May 2022 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 891933.
Publisher Copyright:
© The Author(s) 2022.
Keywords
- argumentation
- blame avoidance
- Brexit
- corpus linguistics
- critical discourse
- analysis
- government communication
- legitimisation
- rationalisation