Abstract
This paper analyses the semantics of ‘hardness’ and ‘softness’ in relation to the noun ‘Brexit’ in a news corpus. These concrete descriptions are frequently applied metaphorically to the complex political process of a nation exiting an economic union. First there is a discussion about what other kinds of things can be hard and soft in the NOW (‘News on the Web’) corpus, followed by an analysis of synonyms for hard Brexit and soft Brexit, evaluating their semantic prosody. Only four genuine collocations with the synonyms of hard Brexit have been found in the corpus, whereas seven have been found for soft Brexit. The paper shows how a corpus can be analysed to demonstrate the way in which the semantic prosody of a metaphorical description is negotiated in part through synonyms that exaggerate or mitigate its positive or negative associations.
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