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Article published In: International Journal of Language and Culture
Vol. 6:2 (2019) ► pp.255–278

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Conceptualizing Brexit

First post-referendum days’ dynamics in metaphorization

 | Sofia University ‘St. Kilment Ohridski’
Published online: 24 January 2020
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https://doi.org/10.1075/ijolc.17012.tin
Abstract
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
  • Online sources
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Cited by (2)

Cited by two other publications

Tincheva, Nelly
2019. “Brexit means…”. Journal of Language and Politics 18:6 ► pp. 848 ff. DOI logo
Tincheva, Nelly
2020. Good Brexit, Bad Brexit: Evaluation Through Metaphoric Conceptualizations in British Media. Baltic Journal of English Language, Literature and Culture 10 ► pp. 149 ff. DOI logo

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