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In:Self- and Other-Reference in Social Contexts: From global to local discourses
Edited by Minna Nevala and Minna Palander-Collin
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 342] 2024
► pp. 62–88

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Chapter 4
The European Union as an in-group in British press and parliamentary debates

 | Tampere University
Published online: 14 March 2024
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https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.342.04rai
Abstract
This chapter focuses on the representation of the European Union as an in-group in British parliamentary debates and newspaper articles in 1974–2015. The focus is on contexts in which the EU is referred to by the first-person plural pronoun we or us. Employing the methods of corpus-assisted discourse studies, the chapter will give a diachronic view of how the EU has been represented in British broadsheets and tabloids as well as in Labour and Conservative MPs’ speeches. Comparisons are also made between left-wing and right-wing discourses. The results suggest that (1) the EU is rarely included in the in-group, but (2) when it is, it is commonly evaluated positively or at least neutrally, but also criticized.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.We indexing in-group in political discourse
  • 3.Methodology
    • 3.1Data
    • 3.2Method
  • 4.Representation of the EU as an in-group
    • 4.1The EU as criticized
    • 4.2The EU as a project
    • 4.3The EU as co-operation
    • 4.4The EU as a global player in parliamentary debates
    • 4.5The EU as a guard in newspaper articles
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • References
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