The 2016 EU referendum has already left a lasting imprint on the English language. Building on previous research (e.g. Lalic-Krstin & Silaski 2018, Buckledee 2018), the present article integrates discourse-analytical and corpus-based methods to explore current developments and place them in the historical context of the past 70 years. Using the News on the Web (NoW) corpus, which covers the years from the run-up to the referendum to the present, I will show that Brexit discourse comprises not only the neologisms inspired by the event itself, but also a number of tropes such as ‘take/want (one’s) country back’, ‘take back control’, ‘(a truly) global Britain’, and more, most of which have developed from discourses of long historical standing. This history will be explored using the Hansard Corpus, which – despite caveats articulated by Mollin (2007) – has proved a valuable resource for the purpose at hand. The analysis will show that at various stages since 1945, Euroscepticism has meshed both with the rhetoric of the political left and the political right and that, ultimately, the UK’s position vis a vis Europe has been negotiated in the context of massive sociocultural transformations such as the dissolution of the British Empire and the European postwar economic boom. Pro-European sentiment, which reached its peak in the 1975 referendum endorsing membership in the European Economic Community, shows Britain having overcome the collective ‘phantom pain’ following the dissolution of the British Empire and the erosion of its position as a major world power. The break-up of this pro-European consensus has revealed cultural rifts in the UK which go deeper than the immediate political and economic context of the Brexit vote.

中文翻译：

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退欧：1945年以来英国欧洲怀疑论修辞派的起起伏伏

2016年欧盟公投已经在英语上留下了持久的烙印。在之前的研究（例如Lalic-Krstin＆Silaski 2018，Buckledee 2018）的基础上，本文整合了语篇分析和基于语料库的方法，以探索当前的发展并将其置于过去70年的历史背景中。使用涵盖从筹备到公投到现在的年份的网络新闻（NoW）语料库，我将展示英国退欧话语不仅包括受事件本身启发的新词，而且还包含许多比喻。例如“夺回/想要（一个国家）回国”，“夺回控制权”，“（一个真正的）全球性英国”等等，其中大多数是从历史悠久的论述中发展而来的。将使用《议事录》语料库探索这段历史，尽管有Mollin（2007）提出的警告，但事实证明，这对于实现这一目的是宝贵的资源。分析将显示，自1945年以来的各个阶段，欧洲怀疑论与政治左派和政治右派的言论并存，最终，英国在欧洲等社会文化转型的背景下，就欧洲的立场进行了谈判。大英帝国的解体和战后欧洲的经济繁荣。亲欧洲情绪在1975年的全民公投中达到顶峰，成为欧洲经济共同体的成员，这表明大英帝国解散并削弱了其作为世界主要大国的地位后，英国克服了集体的“幻痛”。