Good Brexit, Bad Brexit: Evaluation Through Metaphoric Conceptualizations in British Media

Abstract

Brexit, i.e. the withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the European Union, is a major event in European and global politics. It has been debated from a multitude of social, economic, and cultural angles. This paper offers a cognitive linguistic perspective on Brexit, and investigates its metaphoric conceptualization on the first days after the 2016 referendum. That period seems especially important as, arguably, it was then that for many UK citizens, Brexit suddenly became more than just a hypothetical possibility. T he investigation is quantitative and follows Socio-cognitive discourse studies principles. It registers frequencies of source-domain use in UK online media, and traces preferences as to general source-domain semantics. The findings strongly suggest the presence of negative source-domain preferences. This negative metaphoric construal comes in stark contrast with the 3-year par between the Leave and Remain stances in the UK. To explain that discrepancy, the paper argues in support of the importance of ‘levels’ in source-domain use. Admittedly, throughout Lakovian works (e.g., Lakoff and Johnson, 1980, 1999), conceptual metaphoric transfer has been argued to take place at what Rosch et al. postulate as basic-level categorization (1973). However, as the present paper suggests, Rosch’s ‘levels’ in prototypology can be seen as functioning through conceptual metonymy. That, in its turn, combined with the all-pervasive cognitive mechanism of spreading activation (first introduced into linguistics by de Beaugrande and Dressler in 1981) suggests all semantic levels can be co-activated in the process of metaphorization, regardless of which level is currently being highlighted and drawn on. As a consequence, different semantic levels are believed here to have the potential to co-influence inferences and connotations resulting from conceptual metaphorization. Thus, the approach adopted in the present study also has the potential to explain why it has been so difficult for scholars to pinpoint and formulate metaphoric transfers. Importantly, the ‘levels’ proposed here should be differentiated from, although not interpreted as contradicting, the metaphor-relevant levels specified in Kövecses (2010).