Conceptualizing Brexit
First post-referendum days’ dynamics in metaphorization
Brexit, i.e. the withdrawal of the United Kingdom (UK) from the European Union (EU), is a major event not only in
European but also in global politics. Its effect is still to be witnessed and its future impact is debated from a variety of
angles – social, economic, cultural, ethnic, religious, etc. The present paper offers a cognitive linguistic perspective on the
phenomenon. It aims to investigate the conceptual metaphorization of Brexit on the first days after the 2016 referendum. That period
seems of special importance as, arguably, it was then that for many UK citizens, Brexit suddenly became part of reality and not
just a hypothetical possibility.
The paper presents data on the dynamics of employing different source domains on each of the first 4 days after
the referendum. The main objective is to isolate regularities and tendencies in how the selected culturally-significant source
domains help structure the concept. The analysis of the dataset of English-language EU online media texts appearing on the first 4
post-referendum days reveals that the most prominent source domains in the metaphoric conceptualization of brexit are
divorce, a natural disaster and part of a journey.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Theoretical background
- 3.Data
- 4.Method
- 5.Results and discussion
- 6.Conclusions
-
References
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Online sources
References (57)
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