Threat Construction In Brexit Newspaper Discourse

The 2016 vote to leave the European Union is one of the biggest events in recent United Kingdom politics.The Brexit referendum,followed by a series surprising turns of the talks and negotiations between Britain and the E.U.,lifted political uncertainty of the country and even of the whole western world to unprecedented levels,and therefore has received unparalleled amounts of news coverage.Among the various themes in Brexit discourse,economic,political/legal,and immigration arguments stand out as the most salient ones.Newspaper discourse,especially those in support of the Leave camp,tend to depict the EU and EU immigration as a threat to Britain.From the perspective of text and discourse,the threat construction in Brexit news discourse is realized through discursive strategies.From the social perspective,the threat construction in Brexit newspaper discourse is influenced by certain social ideology.The current research conducts a corpus-based analysis of newspaper discourse immediately surrounding the terms “Brexit” and “immigration” in the news coverage by 3 British tabloids(the Daily Express,the Daily Mail,and the Sun).Drawing on Discourse Space Theory and Proximization Theory,this thesis aims to gain a better understanding as to how and why the British newspaper discourse constructed the EU and immigration into an image of threat.It reveals that lexico-grammatical strategies were adopted in Brexit newspaper discourse for the construal of antagonism between Britain and the EU.The EU is constructed into a threat to the British economy,political/legal sovereignty,and immigration control.Immigration is constructed as an approaching threat to Britain in spatial,temporal,and axiological terms.The threat construction can be attributed to the historical Euroscepticism in Britain and to the Eurosceptic ideology of the Leave camp during the Brexit campaign.Although this research is categorized to be the study on political and newspaper discourses of Brexit,its research paradigm can also provide some reference for the study of threat construction in other public discourse fields such as environment and healthcare.