The construction and disarticulation of national identities through language vis-a-vis the Scottish referendum of independence

• Authors: Jesus Romero-Trillo , Caroline Cheshire
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

This article examines the discursive construction of Scottish and British-English national identities in the printed press within the context of the planned Scottish independence referendum. Using Critical Discourse Analysis and informed by sociological and anthropological research, the study uses a Corpus Linguistics approach to analyse newspaper texts from the Scottish and British printed media to define the strategies used in the construction and disarticulation of these identities and the ideologies behind them. The results of the analysis will show that the Scottish broadsheets use a staunchly Scottish rhetoric with frequent examples of nation flagging, showing the palpable struggle for power and a certain sense of inferiority. Inadvertently or otherwise, these newspapers engender a sense of separateness by employing techniques of positive in-group identification. The Scottish editions of UK broadsheets, on the contrary, hold a more Anglocentric perspective and their treatment of the referendum is more political than ideological, frequently attributing negative evaluations to the independence issue and engaging in the practice of "tartanisation". To conclude, the UK broadsheets tend to provide a more balanced and objective point of view, thus being at the political centre of the social debate enacted by the referendum and the subsequent possible independence of Scotland.

Keywords

EN

identity; corpus linguistics; Critical Discourse Analysis; Scotland; tartanisation

• Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
• Journal: Lodz Papers in Pragmatics
• Year: 2014
• Volume: 10
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 41-66

Dates

published

2014-06-01

received

2014-02-24

revised

2014-04-15

accepted

2014-05-23

online

2014-06-01

Contributors

author

Jesus Romero-Trillo

• Universidad Autonoma de Madrid, Departamento de Filologia Inglesa, Facultad de Filosofia y Letras, 28049-Madrid, Spain

author

Caroline Cheshire

• Universidad Autonoma de Madrid, Departamento de Filologia Inglesa, Facultad de Filosofia y Letras, 28049-Madrid, Spain

Identifiers

DOI

10.1515/lpp-2014-0003