Journal of Language and Politics - Volume 14, Issue 6, 2015

In 1999 a devolved Scottish Parliament was established within the United Kingdom following a referendum two years earlier. The current governing party in that Parliament – the SNP – held a referendum on Scottish independence in September 2014, which resulted in a decision to stay within the UK. However, during the referendum campaign promises were made by the main UK parties to transfer further power away from the British Parliament at Westminster to the Scottish Parliament in the hope this would satisfy demands for greater self-government in Scotland. This paper analyses the rhetoric of the leaders of Britain’s two main political parties in an effort to detect strategies used to construct and perpetuate Britishness in the context of devolution and a threat to the British state. It finds a number of discursive strategies deployed to promote unity and difference to (non-British) others. It also suggests the apparent need by British political leaders to deploy such British-constructivist strategies involves avoiding even acknowledging the reality of a major constitutional reform such as devolution and therefore political difference between the nations of the UK.

In this article we report on a corpus-based study of the lexical item ‘choice’. ‘Choice’ was previously found to be a keyword in Jeffries and Walker’s (2012) study of political discourse from the New Labour years, occurring more frequently in newspaper articles during that period (1998–2007) than in those dating from the years in which John Major was Prime Minister (1990–1997). The current project investigates the use of ‘choice’ in British general election manifestos between 1900 and 2010. We first of all carry out a quantitative study of the use of ‘choice’ by the three main UK political parties across this time period, before undertaking a qualitative study of the use of the word in context. Our approach is informed by work in lexical meaning and critical stylistics, and demonstrates how ‘choice’ has taken on new semantic meanings in a political context.

This article examines China’s Confucius Institute program, a significant language policy/planning initiative. I adopt a political perspective in looking into the birth of this language policy initiative, focusing on its role in reconstructing China’s national identity in the context of its rise and its international relations. I explore the background against which the Confucius Institute initiative was formed, and analyse how this initiative was received in the West and how China responded to it. I argue that China is undergoing a reconstruction of its national identity and the Confucius Institute initiative is a major part of this effort. I suggest that such a reconstruction of national identity is an interactive process with an outcome resulting from China’s negotiation with the international community, involving China stating a new position, listening to international responses, clarifying and elaborating upon its position until its new position is accepted by the international community.

This paper investigates the effect of an upcoming election on disorderly behaviour in two Houses of Representatives: that of the Australian Federal Parliament and that of the New Zealand Parliament. Two hypotheses are tested. The first hypothesis is that, notwithstanding their common origins in the Westminster parliamentary tradition, there are significant genrelectal differences in the way the two Houses respond to the impending election. The second hypothesis is that both will respond by becoming increasingly disorderly. The locus for measuring disorderly conduct is taken from the Wednesday parliamentary Question Time for the year 2007 in the case of Australia and 2008 in the case of New Zealand. All instances of disorderly conduct were tracked and a month-by-month measure was made of each kind of disorder as indicated by Standing Orders. All responses of the Speaker to disorder were also logged. The research shows that both hypotheses are corroborated.

This article offers a theoretical solution to the problem of analyzing stable constructions of social structures in discourse. In this article, I first discuss epistemological and methodological issues with Critical Discourse Analysis and Discursive Psychology and combine insights from these two approaches with insight from Discourse Theory as formulated by Laclau and Mouffe (2001). Despite the fact that language use is full of inconsistencies and contradictions and thus does not provide an inventory of stable ideological patterns, it is possible to analyze stable constructions of the social world without assuming the existence of macro-structures (i.e. ideologies or mental representations) as stabilizing background for discursive practices. I demonstrate that stability is not so much a function of ideologies or representations but depends on how the ontological structure of society is imagined. The new hegemonic articulation of the social division along cultural lines limits the positions that can be taken in relation to identity categories regardless of the values one attributes to the categories.