A preliminary sketch of "Brexit" and "tourism": a corpus driven analysis of their relationship as deployed by the press

Resumen

On 23rd June 2016 a crucial referendum for Europe was held: the United Kingdom voted on its permanence or withdrawal from the European Union. The consequent leave result led to the onset of Brexit. Research on this phenomenon throughout its short span of existence has been carried out from multiple angles. Among them, political studies were initially conducted to ascertain the reasons why a leave result won the referendum and the factors on which public support for Brexit would depend (Goodwin and Heath, 2016); social studies pursued the same objective adopting as object of analysis the public tweets posted on the event taking advantage of digital means (Maynard et al., 2017); subsequently, the focus of study was directed towards the influence of the media on the leave result and how such bias was conveyed by the press (Seaton, 2016). In turn, the multifaceted mode of analysis enabled by language studies covers different means of communication on the subject, such as social media platforms (Griebel and Heinrich, 2017) and in particular, news articles (Ballmann, 2017). The latest volume of works in the field at the time of writing (March 2019) presents “the first comprehensive exploration of discourses surrounding the UK’s departure from the EU and as such step towards understanding the reasons for, and processes of, Brexit” (Koller, Kopf and Miglbauer, 2019:1). The present work provides further insight into the press discourse on one of the areas that would be significantly affected by the withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the European Union, namely, the tourism sector and hospitality industry (Rhodes and Ward, 2016).