Cover not available

Article published In: Communicating/Doing Politics
[Journal of Language and Politics 3:3] 2004
► pp. 463–483

Get fulltext from our e-platform
JBE logo with link
PDF logo with download linkDownload PDF
authorization required

The articulation of nation and politics in the Scottish press

 | University of Sunderland
Published online: 7 January 2005
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.3.3.06hig
This article explores the political use of discourses of nation by analysing the use of location formulation across a selection of Scottish newspapers. The article looks at a sample of the election coverage of six Scottish titles and conducts a corpus analysis to set out the patterns in their use of named locales. It argues that references to nation both come in a variety of forms and are driven by the constitutional disputes around the position of Scotland relative to the United Kingdom. In particular, the article finds that the newspapers engage in different rhetorical strategies that emphasise the Scottish dimension of the election, its British dimension, or a negotiated position between the two. The article therefore seeks to highlight the discursive role that the lexical expression of nation and nationhood might have in the articulation between nation and politics, and suggests that in the Scottish case the formulation of nation is employed in the reproduction of competing, constitutionally based political discourses.
References (57)
References
Achard, Pierre. 1993. Discourse and social praxis in the construction of nation and state. Discourse and Society 41, 75–98. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined Communities: The Origins and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Appelbaum, Richard P. 1996. Multiculturalism and flexibility: Some new directions in global capitalism. In: Avery F. Gordon and Christopher Newfield (eds). Mapping Multiculturalism. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 297–316.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
BBC. 2003. Economy becomes battleground. http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/scotland/2954669.stm
Billig, Michael. 1995. Banal Nationalism. London: Sage.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Boorstin, Daniel J. 1963. The Image, or What Happened to the American Dream. Harmondsworth: Pelican.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Boyle, Raymond and Lynch, Peter (eds). 1998. Out of the Ghetto: the Catholic Community in Modern Scotland. Edinburgh: John Donald.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Brookes, Rod. 1999. Newspapers and national identity: The BSE/CJD crisis and the British press. Media, Culture and Society 211, 247–263. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Brown, Alice. 1998. The changing shape of Scottish politics and Scottish identities. Renewal 6(4), 14–22.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cowan, Robert Macnair Wilson. 1946. The Newspaper in Scotland. Glasgow: George Outram.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Chaney, David. 1986. A symbolic mirror of ourselves: Civic ritual in mass society. In: Richard Collins, James Curran, Nicholas Garnham, Paddy Scannell, Philip Schlesinger and Colin Sparks (eds). Media, Culture and Society: A Critical Reader. London: Sage, 247–263.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Chilton, Paul and Shäffner, Christina. 1997. Discourse and politics. In: Teun A. van Dijk (ed.). Discourse as Social Interaction: Discourse Studies: A Multidisciplinary Introduction, volume 2. London: Sage: 206–230.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Crystal, David and Davy, Derek. 1969. Investigating English Style. London: Longman.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Curran, James and Seaton, Jean. 1997. Power Without Responsibility: The Press and Broadcasting in Britain (5th edition). London: Routledge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Debray, Regis. 1983. Critique of Political Reason. London: New Left Books.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
De Cillia, Rudolf, Reisigl, Martin and Wodak, Ruth. 1999. The discursive construction of national identities. Discourse and Society 101, 149–173. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Deutsch, Karl W. 1966. Nationalism and Social Communication: An Inquiry into the Foundations of Nationality (revised edition). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Dudley Edwards, Owen. 1989. A Claim of Right for Scotland. Edinburgh: Polygon.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Fairclough, Norman. 1995. Media Discourse. London: Arnold.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1998. Political discourse in the media: An analytical framework. In: Allan Bell and Peter Garrett (eds). Approaches to Media Discourse. Oxford: Blackwell, 142–162.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2000. New Labour, New Language. London: Routledge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Fairclough, Norman and Wodak, Ruth. 1997. Critical discourse analysis. In: Teun A. van Dijk (ed.). Discourse as Social Interaction: Discourse Studies: A Multidisciplinary Introduction, volume 2. London: Sage, 258–284.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Fowler, Roger. 1991. Language in the News: Discourse and Ideology in the Press. London: Routledge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gellner, Ernest. 1983. Nations and Nationalism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hall, Stuart. 1986. Popular culture and the state. In: Tony Bennett, Colin Mercer and Janet Woollacott (eds). Popular Culture and Social Relations. Buckingham: Open University Press, 22–49.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Halliday, Michael A. K. 1994. An Introduction to Functional Grammar (2nd edition).London: Arnold.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Harper, Norman and Anderson, Jayne. 1997. Press and Journal: The First 250 Years: 1748– 1998. Aberdeen: Aberdeen Journals.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
The Herald. Undated. News Subs Do It in Style. Unpublished Style Guide.
Higgins, Michael. 2004. Putting the nation in the news: The role of location formulation in a selection of Scottish newspapers. Discourse and Society 151, 633–648. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hodge, Robert and Kress, Gunther. 1993. Language as Ideology (2nd edition). London: Routledge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hussain, Asifa and Miller, William. 2004. Comparative Islamophobia: How and why Islamophobia is tied to English nationalism but not to Scottish nationalism. Paper given to 32nd Annual Conference of the National Association for Ethnic Studies, Philadelphia, PA, April 1–3.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kedourie, Elie. 1966. Nationalism (2nd edition). London: Hutchinson.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Laclau, Ernesto. 1977. Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory. London: Verso.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Laclau, Ernesto and Mouffe, Chantal. 2001. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (2nd edition).London: Verso.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Law, Alex. 2001. Near and far: Banal national identity and the press in Scotland. Media, Culture and Society 231, 299–317. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Levinson, Stephen C. 1983. Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Lyons, John. 1977. Semantics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
McCrone, David. 1992. Understanding Scotland: The Sociology of a Stateless Nation. London: Routledge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2002. Who do you say you are? Making sense of national identities in modern Britain. Ethnicities 21, 301–320. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
MacInnes, John. 1992. The press in Scotland. Scottish Affairs 11, 137–149. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Meech, Peter and Richard Kilborn. 1992. Media and identity in a stateless nation: the case of Scotland. Media, Culture and Society 141, 245–259. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Neil, Andrew. 1997. Full Disclosure. London: Pan.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Pêcheux, Michel. 1982. Language, Semantics and Ideology: Stating the Obvious. London: Macmillan. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Phillips, Alastair. 1982. Glasgow’s Herald: 200 Years of a Newspaper. Glasgow: Richard Drew.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Schiller, Dan. 2000. Digital Capitalism: Networking the Global Market System, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Schlesinger, Philip. 1991. Media, State and Nation: Political Violence and Collective Identities. London: Sage.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1998. Scottish devolution and the media. In: Jean Seaton (ed.). Politics and the Media: Harlots and Prerogatives at the Turn of the Millennium. Oxford: Blackwell, 55–74.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Schlesinger, Philip, Miller, David and Dinan, William. 2001. Open Scotland? Journalists, Spin Doctors and Lobbyists. Edinburgh: Polygon.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Scottish Office. 1999. The Scottish Parliament and the Scottish Executive: What They Will Be Able to Do. London: HMSO.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Simpson, Paul. 1993. Language, Ideology and Point of View. London: Routledge. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Slack, Jennifer Daryl. 1996. The theory and method of articulation in cultural studies. In: David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen (eds). Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies. London: Routledge, 112–127.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Smith, Maurice. 1994. Paper Lions: the Scottish Press and National Identity. Edinburgh: Polygon.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Sperber, Dan and Wilson, Deirdre. 1986. Relevance: Communication and Cognition. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Stubbs, Michael. 1992. Text and Corpus Analysis: Computer-Assisted Studies of Language and Culture. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Tumber, Howard. 1999. Introduction. In: Howard Tumber (ed.). News: A Reader. Oxford: Oxford University Press, xv–xix.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1991. The construction of peoplehood: Racism, nationalism, ethnicity. In: Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein (eds). Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities. London: Verso, 71–85.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Wilson, John. 1990. Politically Speaking: The Pragmatic Analysis of Political Language. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cited by (5)

Cited by five other publications

Mattfeldt, Anna
2018. Conflicts in comparison. Pragmatics and Society 9:1 ► pp. 52 ff. DOI logo
Unger, Johann Wolfgang
2013. Rebranding the Scottish Executive. Journal of Language and Politics 12:1 ► pp. 59 ff. DOI logo
Dekavalla, Marina
2010. Tax, war and waiting lists: The construction of national identity in newspaper coverage of general elections after devolution. Discourse & Society 21:6 ► pp. 638 ff. DOI logo
Higgins, Michael
2006. Substantiating a political public sphere in the Scottish press. Journalism 7:1 ► pp. 25 ff. DOI logo
Higgins, Michael
2018. Impending crisis in Scotland . In Crisis and the media [Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture, 76], ► pp. 177 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 13 november 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.

Mobile Menu Logo with link to supplementary files background Layer 1 prag Twitter_Logo_Blue