Monomodal and multimodal instantiations of conceptual metaphors of Brexit

Abstract

This article offers a linguistic analysis of the conceptual metaphors of Brexit, in which the source and the target belong to the same semiotic mode or to different ones. It is shown that the variation of high-level cognitive models underpinning metaphoric images of Brexit reflects the author’s stance towards the event. Phases of Brexit are associated with different image-schematic cognitive models, and this impinges on the range of those metaphors of Brexit that involve low-level concepts.