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Part of
Discourse Studies in Public Communication
Edited by Eliecer Crespo-Fernández
[Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture 92] 2021
► pp. 15–38

Chapter 1
Imagining the nation in British politics

ORCID logo | Instituto Cultura y Sociedad, Universidad de Navarra , Spain

In European politics today, the issues of nationalism and populism are attracting considerable research attention. However, most discourse studies have either focused exclusively on far-right politics, or have looked at populism at both extremes of the political spectrum. In this chapter, I approach the discursive representation of the nation and the people from an exploratory, comparative perspective informed by corpus assisted discourse studies, drawing on mixed methodology, and focusing on the politics of Great Britain. My corpus contains six 2017 election manifestos: Conservative, Labour, Liberal Democrats, UKIP, Scottish National Party, and Plaid Cymru. Principled searches are conducted for references to nations, national groups and people/citizens, which are then analysed qualitatively in a contrastive perspective.

Keywords: populism, nationalist, discourse analysis, corpus-assisted discourse analysis, corpus linguistics, United Kingdom, politics
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Corpus and method
  • 3.Analysis: Representing the nation
    • 3.1Naming places: A specifically British problem?
    • 3.2Nations and countries
    • 3.3People or citizens?
    • 3.4Society or communities?
  • 4.Discussion
  • Note
  • References
Published online: 7 April 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/dapsac.92.01bre
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