”Gratis broddar till dig som är 65 år och bor i Göteborg”: En fallstudie av legitimeringsstrategier i svenska kommuners webbtexter riktade till seniorer

Offers of free ice cleats to senior citizens is a rather new phenomenon in Sweden. Therefore, Swedish municipalities should strive to linguistically legitimize such offers to convince senior citizens to use ice cleats during the winter season. The research questions for the reported study are (1) Which main strategies for legitimation appear in the municipalities’ texts? (2) Which subtypes to different main strategies appear in the municipalities’ texts? (3) What general picture of the municipalities’ approach to senior citizens can the identified strategies be said to convey? A corpus of 23 texts on municipal websites, published in 2022 or 2023, is analysed, using van Leeuwen's model for legitimation analysis (2008) as a theoretical-methodical basis. The results of the study show that ice cleat offers are legitimized lexicogrammatically mainly through the two main legitimation strategies Authorization and Rationalization. The main strategy Moral Evaluation, with a focus on public health and the health and well-being of senior citizens, is also used. No instances of the main strategy Mythopoesis are identified. Several subtypes to the three main strategies Authorization, Rationalization and Moral Evaluation are identified in the corpus. Some of the strategies for legitimation used can be deemed as an expression of an equal relationship between municipalities and senior citizens, while others can be said to express an unequal relationship.