Discursive construction of Scottish national identity

The assumption that Scottish national identity is said to be constructed in newspaper discourse provides the basis for this work. Venturing into the realm of national identity, nationalism became an increasingly important theme and turned into the second most important concept dealt with in this book. In order to guide this research, a number of questions were asked: Which groups or individuals are responsible for the construction of nationalist ideologies? In what ways can journalists be assumed to play into the whole dynamic of (re-)producing ideological language? Is there textual evidence for words/phrases that are said to be responsible for constructing and reinforcing national identity? Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) provided the tools needed in order for ideological language to be revealed and analysed and was, therefore, chosen as the methodology to be applied. A side effect accompanying this research is the aim to reveal apparent and perhaps not so apparent weaknesses and controversies relating to both the analytical framework as well as to the theories and concepts scrutinised here.