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Article published In:
Metaphor and the Social World
Vol. 8:1 (2018) ► pp.25–39

The end of a long and fraught marriage

Metaphorical images structuring the Brexit discourse

| University of Belgrade
| University of Belgrade

Set against the backdrop of a separation process between Britain and the EU, popularly referred to as Brexit, our paper explores how the married partners metaphor scenario structures the Brexit discourse via vivid metaphorical images of political reality describing complicated relations between Britain and the EU. We use a critical approach to metaphor (Charteris-Black, 2004, 2005) and especially apply Musolff’s (2006) concept of ‘metaphor scenario’ to the data collection gathered from various media sources published in English during the period closely preceding and following the Brexit vote. As “the married partners scenario is applicable to any bilateral […] relationship” (Musolff, 2006, p. 34), by exemplifying the Britain-EU relationship via numerous lexical instantiations (e.g., rocky marriage, messy divorce very hard on the children, shotgun divorce), we attest to a great generative potential of the married partners scenario as well as its argumentative use. Our main aim is to point out how the married partners metaphor scenario is used in political discourse both to simplify and enable the understanding of the tangled relationship between Britain and the EU at a crucial point in their history.

Keywords: Brexit, metaphor, marriage metaphor, divorce metaphor, metaphor scenario, critical metaphor analysis.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Theoretical framework
  • 3.Data collection and method
  • 4.The married partners scenario
    • 4.1The marriage metaphor in the Brexit discourse
    • 4.2The divorce metaphor
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Note
  • References
Published online: 7 May 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/msw.17010.dur
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