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This article explores the role of location formulation in the expression of nationhood in six Scottish newspapers' coverage of a domestic political event The article thaws upon a corpus analysis comparing the incidence of `location lexical tokens' in the Scottish papers with a selection from the UK and England. It finds that the Scottish papers stress the national character of the political process, occasionally doing so alongside an inclusive rhetoric. The article also finds that the Scottish papers mobilize an internal political vocabulary around the expression of location, manifest in the widespread adoption of the political metonym `Holyrood' for the Scottish parliaments and in the use of localized political discourses. The article therefore suggests that explicit reference to the home nation is an important component of news discourse, and that the systematic study of location formulation also offers an insight into the generation of an internal and nation-specific political vocabulary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To date, studies of social attitudes towards Scottish independence tend to have been of the structured survey or interview variety. This study seeks to support and build upon the findings of recent social attitude surveys on Scottish independence using what is, as far as the author is aware, a novel methodology. This involves combining the corpus linguistic technique of automated semantic tagging with a discourse-historical Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) framework. Applying this to a three-million-word corpus built from a pro-independence internet discussion forum, the analysis shows, firstly, a view that independence will strengthen, consolidate or transform Scottish identity in a positive way and, secondly, a distinct lack of strategies that seek to dismantle British identity or refer to historical disputes. Thus, an evaluation of this methodology suggests that it successfully manages to produce findings that support previous research, challenge existing stereotypes, and allow new insight into Scottish nationalist ideology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]