The Brexit Island, voices from british newspapers and voices from the web: a corpus-based approach

A study on the consequences of an event as unpredictable in its outcomes and as complex as the Brexit vote in the UK and on the relations it may weave with the ‘insularity’ of the country can be approached in many ways. Most of the papers in this volume shape connections between the Island of Brexit and literary texts, focusing on how physical, intellectual or sentimental ‘insularity’ can affect the mood and the state of mind of single authors or literary and artistic movements. My approach, at least initially, is rather different, as it explores how the mood and state of mind emerging from non-literary texts, namely daily newspapers, can be investigated through the linguistic analysis of large bodies of text. The methodology employed is based on Corpus Linguistics and on the collection of large corpora of texts that are stored on computer and analysed through dedicated software both quantitatively and qualitatively. But the same approach can and will be also applied to much smaller datasets and even to single texts: a scale which is much more frequent in literary studies. In this line, the final part of the study will be devoted to a brief analysis of poems mentioning the Brexit referendum. The use of statistics, figures and quantitative techniques might be perceived as belonging to hard sciences and economics, rather than to humanities and literary studies, but in recent years it has gained ground considerably also in the latter domains. Indeed, amongst the aims of this paper is an introduction to Corpus Linguistics techniques and methodology by illustrating examples of how the use of tools that are normally regarded as being outside the tradition of linguistic or literary criticism – such as the creation of lists based on the frequency of words or of multiword units, their comparison with other lists, the computation of the collocates of specific lexical items and even the use of statistics to compare the results – can actually enhance and bring evidence to the analysis of texts and discourse, in journalistic as well as literary contexts.