The Europe of Brexit: a corpus-assisted discourse study of identities in the press

Carmen Pena Díaz,María Del Mar Sánchez Ramos

doi:10.5209/clac.72672

Abstract

Drawing on a what is known as corpus-assisted discourse study (CADS) approach (Baker et al., 2008), this article will research the construction of different identities by means of the language used in two newspaper articles on Brexit from the Spanish El País and the British The Guardian, to examine how these identities are constructed through media discourse at the time following the Brexit referendum (2016-2018). Media discourse surrounding Brexit is examined under the consideration of media power. A comparable corpus made up of original newspaper articles about Brexit was used to carry out the analysis, identifying statistically significant keywords compared with a reference corpus with the aim of providing an example of how the British and Spanish press construct identity.

Highlights

IntroductionThe term “Brexit” is the combination of “Britain” and “exit” and represents Britain leaving the EU, constituting a national unit in relation to the European Union as a different unit: “us” versus “others”
The aim of this paper is to examine how identities were constructed through media discourse at the time following Brexit (2016-2018), when leaders were deciding how to plan and organize life outside the EU through corpus-assisted discourse study (CADS) and how this is represented in two newspapers with similar ideologies but different perspectives
Two keywords lists result from the comparison of the terms of each of our corpus (The Guardian and El País) with the two references corpora used for our analysis, such as Bank of English (BoE) and CREA respectively

Summary

Introduction

The term “Brexit” is the combination of “Britain” and “exit” and represents Britain leaving the EU, constituting a national unit in relation to the European Union as a different unit: “us” versus “others”. The latter, did reflect the EU and inside national differences, “others” referring to the UK vs the EU and the “pro-EU” vs “pro Brexit”. Those who attempt to build a ‘multicultural’ British national identity and who embrace being part of a wider socio-political area such as the EU have encountered resistance from those who see Britain under threat, as their understanding of the construction of a British

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