“Brexit Means Brexit!”: Investigating the Production of Social Phenomena in Political Discourses

Abstract

The United Kingdom's withdrawal from the European Union, known as Brexit, is arguably the most important political, social, and economic phenomenon in British post-WWII history. This paper analyses parliamentary debates from December 2018 concerning the European Withdrawal Act, focusing on the epistemic modality of Member of Parliaments' (MP) statements, to investigate the ontology of Brexit. Epistemic modality refers to linguistic devices that allow modification with regards to confidence, truthfulness, and probability, and enables investigation of MPs' commitments. Commitments are a part of their status function declaration, which create institutional reality. Analysis of such commitments permits inference about the institutional reality of Brexit. A video abstract is available at https://youtu.be/90RRWApg0rQ.