Constructing Brexit Britain: A Corpus-Assisted Approach to National Identity Discourse (Corpus and Discourse)

Combining corpus linguistics, critical discourse analysis, and a discourse analysis of narratives, this book considers one aspect of the Brexit process: the language that journalists, politicians and individuals used to write and talk about what it means to be British and European around the time of Brexit.It reveals a trajectory towards a discourse of national division in Brexit Britain in three datasets: pro-Brexit newspaper articles, UK Government documents, and interviews with individual citizens. Demonstrating the important role that (supra-)national identity discourses played in discussions about Brexit, the book traces a shift towards a representation of Brexit Britain as divided and in decline at a time when the construction of a collective identity is likely to be paramount.The emerging representation is a direct contradiction of the great global trading nation narrative that the Vote Leave campaigners - and later the UK Government - promised, questioning the discursive succes