Commitment to the truth or defensive stance? Political strategies in the Brexit contest

Abstract

This paper analyses politicians’ selection of adverbs of certainty and extreme case formulations (ECFs) in both the 1975 Referendum and the Brexit (2016). This analysis helped discover if politicians in the 1975 Referendum and the Brexit: (a) framed a similar or different reality through their discourse choices and (b) used the same types of adverbs of certainty and ECFs and with the same frequency. For this purpose, we contrasted both the time (the 1975 Referendum vs. the Brexit) and the position (Anti-Europe vs. Pro-Europe). The corpus was made up of eight different recordings. Four of them were about the Brexit and four about the 1975 Referendum. In the case of the Brexit corpus, two recordings were Pro-Europe, two were Anti-Europe, and the same was in the case of the 1975 Referendum corpus.