Abstract:
Since the critical turn in rhetoric, much has been said about the ways in which identification is accomplished. Not least among those studies concerned with identity, Maurice Charland's constitutive rhetoric has been widely influential in the field of communication. Charland's notion of the origins of identity in discourse has not been significantly challenged since he first described constitutive rhetoric as a process. At the same time, the reemergence of nationalist causes has suggested that we might return to the theory in order to understand the discourse that is influencing debates about the sovereignty of people groups. This study examines conceptions of Scottishness both in contemporary and historical discourse to gain a better understanding of how Charland's constitutive rhetoric functions. However, it also points out crucial flaws in Charland's concept and seeks to reconstruct constitutive rhetoric to be consistent with a more dynamic conception of society and rhetoric's role in it.
