Truths, lies and figurative scenarios – Metaphors at the heart of Brexit (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Europe of Scary Metaphors: The Voices of the British Right-Wing Press
Zeitschrift Fur Anglistik Und Amerikanistik, 2019
The United Kingdom's (UK) relationship with the European Union (EU) and the ongoing Brexit negotiations have become the primary focus of both media and public attention. The decision to leave the EU marks not only a crucial point in the UK's history, it also indicates the current political developments in both Britain and Europe. Brexit can be seen as a manifestation of right-wing populism. In the context of the EU membership referendum, it is particularly revealing to trace the linguistic representation of Europe in the national British press. The present corpusbased analysis focuses on metaphorical patterns and related discursive strategies employed in the construction of the idea of Europe in The Daily Telegraph, The Daily Mail and The Sun in the years 2016-2018. The analysis aims to identify the linguistic mechanisms that ensure the adaptability of the right-wing ideology promoted by these newspapers in the changing social and political environment of contemporary Britain. Methodologically, the research applies a mixed approach involving discourse analysis and corpus linguistics with a focus on the metaphorical patterns employed in the construction of the idea of Europe.
Taking back control: The role of image schemas in the Brexit discourse
Russian Journal of Linguistics
Can image schemas sustain the discourse on Brexit while building up emotional and evaluative dimensions in the process? This paper analyzes the embodied meaning used in the Brexit discourse as seen through the lens of the pro-leave newspaper (The Telegraph). By way of a discourse-based approach, the main goal of this study is to show the persuasive role that two recurrent image schemas (CONTAINMENT AND FORCE) play in the characterization of the Brexit discourse, which were used to evoke strong feelings of fear and anger to mobilize readers into taking a defensive position against the EU at the time of the referendum. Regarding the material to be analyzed, a corpus of 43,576 words was compiled, distributed in 34 opinion articles and 13 leading articles, from May 22 to June 22, 2016. The data were analyzed from the perspective of Conceptual Metaphor Theory, where the embodiment of the mind plays a key role. The analysis reveals that the use of the metaphor scenario ‘take back control’...
From Eating Cake to Crashing Out: Constructing the Myth of a No Deal Brexit
Comparative European Politics, 2019
This article traces the emergence and development of claims that the 2016 referendum on the UK's membership of the European Union delivered a mandate for a so-called 'no deal' Brexit. Utilising Lacanian ideas about group mobilisation combined with a detailed content analysis and evidence drawn from polling data, it shows that this no deal narrative should be viewed as a discursive project that was constructed by a section of Leave campaigners relatively late into the Brexit process amidst growing disillusionment with the direction that negotiations with the EU were taking. By emphasising the role of Brexit as an 'empty signifier' the article shows that Brexit was initially successful in mobilising and uniting a disparate, but often unconnected, range of discontent to its cause. However, over time the complexities of the Brexit process triggered a discursive 'war of position' as competing visions of Brexit attempted to vie for dominance amongst the Leave camp. It is within this context that the myth of no deal emerged as an attempt by an elite group of actors to re-mobilise support for their cause.
(2018) The end of a long and fraught marriage: Metaphorical images structuring the Brexit discourse
Metaphor and the Social World, 2018
Set against the backdrop of a separation process between Britain and the EU, popularly referred to as Brexit, our paper explores how the MARRIED PARTNERS metaphor scenario structures the Brexit discourse via vivid metaphorical images of political reality describing complicated relations between Britain and the EU. We use a critical approach to metaphor (Charteris-Black, 2004, 2005) and especially apply Musolff " s (2006) concept of " metaphor scenario " to the data collection gathered from various media sources published in English during the period closely preceding and following the Brexit vote. As " the MARRIED PARTNERS scenario is applicable to any bilateral […] relationship " (Musolff, 2006, p. 34), by exemplifying the Britain-EU relationship via numerous lexical instantiations (e.g. rocky marriage, messy divorce very hard on the children, shotgun divorce, etc.), we attest to a great generative potential of the MARRIED PARTNERS scenario as well as its argumentative use. Our main aim is to point out how the MARRIED PARTNERS metaphor scenario is used in political discourse both to simplify and enable the understanding of the tangled relationship between Britain and the EU at a crucial point in their history.
Metaphor in Economics and Specialised Discourse, 2021
Ever since its creation, the European Union has developed a specific discourse in order to make itself acceptable to its members and to the international community at large (Hülsse 2006). However, over the last decades the EU has been under attack for its alleged “democratic deficit”, with an intense controversy at various levels about whether its structure and organization respond to the demands of democratic states (Moravscik 2008). In this debate, the “weapons” appeal not only to reason, but also to affective factors, leading to a whole array of imagery by both sides aimed at winning an academic contest which seems ever more present nowadays. Critics use images like “democratic deficit”, or argue that the “European regulations are often out of proportion to the benefits”. For their part, EU supporters also attribute physical properties to abstract concepts, as in “measure the state of EU democracy” or “shape voting decisions and fundamental political alignments”, or compare the EU to a person suffering extreme restraints, wearing “the procedural straightjacket of extreme transparency”. In our study, we shall draw from an ad hoc sample of papers by political scientists in order to analyse the metaphorical scenarios used in the academic discourse on the legitimacy of the European Union and its policies. It is our belief that this analysis will illustrate both the language used by academics in scholarly debates and, in general, on the use of metaphor in academic discourse.
In 2005, referenda about the EU's constitutional treaty were held in several European countries, which resulted in a No vote in France and the Netherlands and which left the European polity both devastated and clueless. The present essay describes metaphors in British journalism beginning with the year before the referenda and ending a few months after them. In 675 examined newspaper articles from the Sun and the Guardian, mostly commentaries, diverse conceptual patterns are found that belong to five major headings (= metaphoric target domains): the EU as political entity, the EU constitutional treaty, the process of EU integration, the impact of the No votes on the European polity, and pro- or anti-constitution campaigning prior to the referenda. A software-assisted and full-scale survey of metaphors is undertaken to identify recurrent conceptual metaphor patterns. This is followed by a theoretical analysis that aims to exemplify how cross-buttressing tendencies in the metaphor...
BREXIT FRAMING IN BRITISH MEDIA
International Multidisciplinary Scientific Conference On The Dialogue Between Sciences & Arts, Religion & Education, 2019
2019 brings about fiery debates and endless questions about the United Kingdom's current and future relation to the European Union. An important aspect is whether the United Kingdom should or should not organise another national referendum regarding membership in the European Union. It is, nevertheless, equally important to identify the causes and reasons that led to the vote in favour of Leave in the 2016 referendum, widely known as Brexit. It is contended here that the British media played an important role in shaping the citizens' options, imposing themselves as actors in the construction of a sociological phenomenon with serious effects and consequences. Combining the linguistic and cultural perspectives, with scientific tools from the domain of Discourse Analysis, this paper will look into several relevant pro-and anti-Brexit views, as presented by important British newspapers to the wide public, tracing their arguments and the way in which manipulation was achieved on both Leave and Remain sides..
Journal of Community and Applied Social Psychology, 2019
Cassirer's notion of myth and Langer's process philosophy are used to provide a novel perspective upon how feelings were both expressed and organised in the Brexit referendum, showing how multiple, overlapping organisations of feelings created a set of emergent rationalities. Political parties and campaigns, the media, and lived experience serve as analytic foci, and various feelings are identified. It is concluded that the result was largely rational on its own terms and that understanding this is central to the social psychology of Brexit.