Brexit: before and after. A corpus-assisted study of the Referendum campaigns and the immediate aftermath

In this work, we look at how attitudes to the 2016 Brexit Referendum were represented in a number of UK national newspapers, some of which were broadly pro-Brexit, others anti-Brexit, in the three-month period immediately before the vote and in a similar stretch of time after. Given the large scale of data, the examination availed itself of corpus linguistics and corpus-assisted discourse studies (CADS) methodologies. The principal impression arising from the data before the vote was that to divide attitudes towards Brexit into “for or “against” was far too simplistic. They were many shades of opinion between the two extremes. In addition, both the “for” and the “against” sides contained leftwing and rightwing voices. As regards the comments of various agents after the vote, we uncovered some rather surprising reactions by both the “winners” and “losers”.