The Europe of Brexit: A corpus-assisted discourse study of identities in the press

Abstract

Drawing on what is known as a corpus-assisted discourse study (CADS) approach (Baker et al., 2008), this article will research the construction of different identities by means of the language used in two newspaper articles on Brexit from the Spanish El País and the British The Guardian, to examine how these identities are constructed through media discourse at the time following the Brexit referendum (2016-2018). Media discourse surrounding Brexit is examined under the consideration of media power. A comparable corpus made up of original newspaper articles about Brexit was used to carry out the analysis, identifying statistically significant keywords compared with a reference corpus with the aim of providing an example of how the British and Spanish press construct identity.