Humiliating and dividing the nation in the British pro-Brexit press: a corpus-assisted analysis

Abstract

Since the United Kingdom's referendum on European Union (EU) membership in 2016, a new political cleavage of Remainers and Leavers has developed (Kelley, N. [2019]. British social attitudes survey: Britain's shifting identities and attitudes. (36). National Centre for Research). This paper explores how five pro-Brexit newspapers discursively construct political division in Britain in relation to two key events in the final year of Britain's EU membership: the extension of the withdrawal process past the original date of March, and the introduction of the Benn Act in September. The paper reveals two primary discursive constructions of division in Britain: a divide between incompetent and arrogant political officials and an innocent, suffering public, and an identity cleavage between pro-Remain 'elites' and 'ordinary' Leave-voting citizens. The study argues that the construction of these divisions threatens a collective national identity in Britain at a time when it is most required. It concludes that by apportioning blame for sociopolitical divisions, the newspapers obfuscate their role in contributing to disunity in the UK.

‘A tide of homeless, drug-addicted and mentally ill people’: Representing homeless people in MailOnline content

“…Using the UCREL Semantic Analysis System in Wmatrix, I compared the relative frequencies of words associated with the semantic domains in the MailOnline corpus with their relative frequencies in the British National Corpus (BNC) Informative Sampler, which consists of 779,027 words. Following Parnell (2022), I chose this reference corpus because it consists solely of informative writing and therefore highlights instances of more evaluative language use in news content that purports to be more objective. I sorted the semantic domains by effect size and looked closely at domains which had a log-ratio value above 1.0, a log-likelihood value above 6.63, and a frequency value above 50.…”