Pragmalinguistic means of constructing the common past in british political speech
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17308/lic.2020.1/2737Keywords:
national identity, Brexit, common past, thematic area, strategy, linguistic meansAbstract
This study is a part of the research which focuses on the study of discursive construction of British national identity. This article aims to reveal what pragmalinguistic tools are used to construct the common past as a component of the identity in British Brexit-discourse. The data include speeches by British politicians retrieved from the official websites of the campaigns “Vote Leave” and “Britain Stronger in Europe”. In terms of methodology, the study draws on techniques of critical discourse analysis. As a result, two key strategies of constructing the common past are identified. These strategies include the strategy of grouping countries and the strategy of distancing countries. The common past is constructed along different lines the Remainers and the Brexiteers. In the speeches by the Remainers the common past is constructed as shared with Europe, whereas in the Brexiteers’ speeches it is constructed as belonging to the British nation only. The range of pragmalinguistic resources used within these strategies includes references to significant historic events and dates, lexemes with temporal semantics and the semantics of unity, grammatical markers of the past, metaphors and idioms, inclusive noun phrases, lexical markers of positive and negative evaluation. The prospects for research include the expansion of the data and the diachronic study of the discursive construction of identity in the British political discourse.
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