Modelling through Modality: (Re)shaping Brexit

Due to Brexit, the UK has been involved in a continuous political debate between Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, and Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the opposition. This paper compares and analyses the modality used in a corpus consisting of their political speeches until Brexit day. Modal verbs are...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: Almazán-Ruiz, Encarnación, Orrequia-Barea, Aroa
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Estado:Versión aceptada para publicación
Fecha de publicación:2021
País:España
Institución:Universidad de Jaén
Repositorio:RUJA. Repositorio Institucional de la Producción Científica de la Universidad de Jaén
OAI Identifier:oai:ruja.ujaen.es:10953/4378
Acceso en línea:https://doi.org/10.24197/ersjes.42.2021.127-153
https://revistas.uva.es/index.php/esreview/article/view/5620
https://hdl.handle.net/10953/4378
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Brexit
Modal verbs
Modality
Political discourse
Corpus linguistics
Descripción
Sumario:Due to Brexit, the UK has been involved in a continuous political debate between Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, and Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the opposition. This paper compares and analyses the modality used in a corpus consisting of their political speeches until Brexit day. Modal verbs are used to express ability, possibility, willingness, certainty, obligation and necessity. Politicians’ choice of certain words can be a useful tool to affect voters’ decisions and modality is a resource which reinforces that influence. The findings show remarkable similarities between both politicians and reveal that possibility is the most frequent meaning of the modal verbs used in the corpus.