Description
Between 2016–2021, in response to repeated calls for a second Scottish independence popular referendum, two British Prime Ministers – Theresa May and Boris Johnson – adopted a holding position in order to postpone the second plebiscite sine die and thus neutralise this contested issue. Having adopted the general orientation of the discourse historical approach to discourse analysis, and working with a qualitative dataset of May’s and Johnson’s public utterances on the second Scottish referendum in the 2016–2021 period, the contribution investigates how exactly the second Scottish independence referendum was discursively constructed in the prime ministerial rhetoric. By doing so, it provides an insight into how May and Johnson made sense of the polarising question of Scottish independence and legitimised, through language, their perspectives thereof.
