Friends don't let friends go Brexiting without a mandate. Changing discourses of Brexit in The Guardian

This chapter investigates the discourse of Brexit in the UK newspaper The Guardian, based on a corpus containing every article published on The Guardian website since 2000. Adopting a corpus linguistic approach, we explore the diachronic development of the word Brexit, starting with its first attestation in an article appearing in the Business section on 9 August 2012. We study the use of this word and related terms, such as Brexiteers and Brexiters, in The Guardian as a whole as well as in individual sections of the newspaper, focusing in particular on the Business domain and the blog-style Comment is Free section. Our findings show that the uncertainty surrounding Brexit has led to the construction of different discourses in these newspaper sections that focus, on the one hand, on the negative impact of the referendum vote and, on the other hand, involve attempts at defining the phenomenon of Brexit.