Ever since Britain voted to leave the European Union, emotions have dominated the public debate. How negative emotions, such as anger, have impacted the Brexit vote, has been widely researched. Less attention has been focused on the role positive emotions played in debating Britain’s relationship to the EU. Using critical discourse analysis and drawing on appraisal theory to investigate the representation of emotions in six sample texts from a corpus of so-called ‘Euromyths’ (N = 334), this study argues that positive emotions were used to create a myth in Roland Barthes’ sense to naturalise a Eurosceptic ideology of British defiance and power.

自从英国投票决定退出欧盟以来，公众的辩论就占据了主导地位。诸如愤怒之类的消极情绪如何影响英国脱欧公投，已经得到广泛研究。人们较少关注的是积极情绪在辩论英国与欧盟关系中所起的作用。运用批判性话语分析并运用评估理论研究了所谓的“欧洲神话”（N  = 334）语料中六种示例文本中的情绪表征，该研究认为，积极的情绪被用来在罗兰·巴特（Roland Barthes）中创造神话使欧洲怀疑论者对英国的蔑视和权力意识形态自然化的感觉。