Cover not available
Article published In:
Communicating/Doing Politics
[Journal of Language and Politics 3:3] 2004
► pp. 463–483

The articulation of nation and politics in the Scottish press

| University of Sunderland

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.

Keywords: National identity, critical discourse analysis, articulation, location formulation, location tokens, election coverage, banal nationalism
Published online: 7 January 2005
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.3.3.06hig
References
Achard, Pierre
1993 Discourse and social praxis in the construction of nation and state. Discourse and Society 41, 75–98. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Anderson, Benedict
1983 Imagined Communities: The Origins and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso.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
BBC
2003 Economy becomes battleground. http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/scotland/2954669.stm
Billig, Michael
1995 Banal Nationalism. London: Sage.Google Scholar
Boorstin, Daniel J.
1963 The Image, or What Happened to the American Dream. Harmondsworth: Pelican.Google Scholar
Boyle, Raymond and Lynch, Peter
(eds) 1998 Out of the Ghetto: the Catholic Community in Modern Scotland. Edinburgh: John Donald.Google Scholar
Brookes, Rod
1999 Newspapers and national identity: The BSE/CJD crisis and the British press. Media, Culture and Society 211, 247–263. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Brown, Alice
1998 The changing shape of Scottish politics and Scottish identities. Renewal 6(4), 14–22.Google Scholar
Cowan, Robert Macnair Wilson
1946 The Newspaper in Scotland. Glasgow: George Outram.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
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
Crystal, David and Davy, Derek
1969 Investigating English Style. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Curran, James and Seaton, Jean
1997 Power Without Responsibility: The Press and Broadcasting in Britain (5th edition). London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Debray, Regis
1983 Critique of Political Reason. London: New Left Books.Google Scholar
De Cillia, Rudolf, Reisigl, Martin and Wodak, Ruth
1999 The discursive construction of national identities. Discourse and Society 101, 149–173. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Deutsch, Karl W.
1966 Nationalism and Social Communication: An Inquiry into the Foundations of Nationality (revised edition). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Dudley Edwards, Owen
1989 A Claim of Right for Scotland. Edinburgh: Polygon.Google Scholar
Fairclough, Norman
1995 Media Discourse. London: Arnold.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
2000 New Labour, New Language. London: Routledge.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
Fowler, Roger
1991 Language in the News: Discourse and Ideology in the Press. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Gellner, Ernest
1983 Nations and Nationalism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.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
Halliday, Michael A. K.
1994 An Introduction to Functional Grammar (2nd edition).London: Arnold.Google Scholar
Harper, Norman and Anderson, Jayne
1997 Press and Journal: The First 250 Years: 1748– 1998. Aberdeen: Aberdeen Journals.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. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hodge, Robert and Kress, Gunther
1993 Language as Ideology (2nd edition). London: Routledge.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
Kedourie, Elie
1966 Nationalism (2nd edition). London: Hutchinson.Google Scholar
Laclau, Ernesto
1977 Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory. London: Verso.Google Scholar
Laclau, Ernesto and Mouffe, Chantal
2001 Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (2nd edition).London: Verso.Google Scholar
Law, Alex
2001 Near and far: Banal national identity and the press in Scotland. Media, Culture and Society 231, 299–317. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Levinson, Stephen C.
1983 Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lyons, John
1977 Semantics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
McCrone, David
1992 Understanding Scotland: The Sociology of a Stateless Nation. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
2002 Who do you say you are? Making sense of national identities in modern Britain. Ethnicities 21, 301–320. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
MacInnes, John
1992 The press in Scotland. Scottish Affairs 11, 137–149. DOI logoGoogle 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. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Neil, Andrew
1997 Full Disclosure. London: Pan.Google Scholar
Pêcheux, Michel
1982 Language, Semantics and Ideology: Stating the Obvious. London: Macmillan. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Phillips, Alastair
1982 Glasgow’s Herald: 200 Years of a Newspaper. Glasgow: Richard Drew.Google Scholar
Schiller, Dan
2000 Digital Capitalism: Networking the Global Market System, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Schlesinger, Philip
1991 Media, State and Nation: Political Violence and Collective Identities. London: Sage.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
Schlesinger, Philip, Miller, David and Dinan, William
2001 Open Scotland? Journalists, Spin Doctors and Lobbyists. Edinburgh: Polygon.Google Scholar
Scottish Office
1999 The Scottish Parliament and the Scottish Executive: What They Will Be Able to Do. London: HMSO.Google Scholar
Simpson, Paul
1993 Language, Ideology and Point of View. London: Routledge. DOI logoGoogle 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
Smith, Maurice
1994 Paper Lions: the Scottish Press and National Identity. Edinburgh: Polygon.Google Scholar
Sperber, Dan and Wilson, Deirdre
1986 Relevance: Communication and Cognition. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Stubbs, Michael
1992 Text and Corpus Analysis: Computer-Assisted Studies of Language and Culture. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Tumber, Howard
1999 Introduction. In: Howard Tumber (ed.). News: A Reader. Oxford: Oxford University Press, xv–xix.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
Wilson, John
1990 Politically Speaking: The Pragmatic Analysis of Political Language. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Cited by

Cited by 5 other publications

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. Chapter 8. Impending crisis in Scotland. In Crisis and the Media [Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture, 76], ► pp. 177 ff. DOI logo
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

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 2 april 2024. 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.