'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 its website since 2000. A corpus linguistic approach explores the diachronic development of the word ‘Brexit’ from its first attestation in the Business section in the Guardian in August 2012. The analysis traces the use of ‘Brexit’ and related terms in the Guardian as a whole and in the Business and blog-style Comment Is Free sections. It shows that the uncertainty of Brexit has generated different discourses detailing impacts of the referendum vote and seeking to define the phenomenon of Brexit.