How is Brexit Linguistically-Conceptualized? The BREXIT IS A JOURNEY metaphor scenario in David Cameron’s, Theresa May’s and Boris Johnson’s Speeches
Résumé
From David Cameron, through Theresa May, to Boris Johnson, what Brexit means has evolved, linguistically speaking, but also conceptually speaking. It is mostly through discourse that this quite unfathomable concept came into being and slowly became a more stable notion in the British and European contexts. Thanks to corpus linguistics software tools together with cognitive linguistics and discourse analysis, this ar-ticle seeks to follow the findings of a previous study on the perception of Brexit by Tories through an analysis of 92 speeches delivered by To-ry Prime Ministers David Cameron, Theresa May, and Boris Johnson. Following a quantitative and qualitative approach, the paper aims to analyze the BREXIT IS A JOURNEY metaphor scenario, and more partic-ularly the direction of the movement and the evaluation of the meta-phor scenarios resorted to by the three Conservative Prime Ministers.