Does Brexit mean Brexit? An analysis of the semantic field of the lexeme Brexit

Abstract

The article presents the results of a discourse analysis of the contextual uses of Brexit. Based on corpus-driven Internet samples, the research employs the method of semantic field analysis devised by Robin (1980) and her team of researchers from the Saint-Cloud Political Lexicography Center. According to Robin, in order to find the meaning of a word, the context of its use must be analysed, as well as its lexical relations with other linguistic units. For this reason, we have divided the elements of the co-text of the lexeme Brexit into six groups, which represent various connections of linguistic items with the SUBJECT, i.e. the lexeme under scrutiny. Subsequently, in compliance with Kłosiński’s approach (1994), we propose the definitions of the SUBJECT which reflect the meanings featuring the actual usages of the lexeme Brexit and which integrate the key words from the semantic field of the concept in question.