Force-dynamics and conceptual metaphor in Brexit negotiations: the construal of Gibraltar’s status in Spanish online newspapers

Abstract

In light of recent political events surrounding the Brexit negotiations, there is still substantial uncertainty around the conditions and repercussions of the United Kingdom’s withdrawal from the European Union. Gibraltar’s unique geographical and socio-political
emplacement is highlighted by both Spanish and British governments in the negotiations, and the beginning of 2019 witnessed the first political advancements toward a new denomination of Gibraltar in a post-Brexit era.

This paper contributes to ongoing research on discourses of Brexit (e.g. Koller et al., 2019; Zappettini, 2019) by critically analysing
Spanish online newspapers’ treatment of a series of events that led to Gibraltar’s new status as a ‘colony’ under EU policy in April 2019. The analysis describes the representations of these political events in both language and image, their variability across newspapers according to their ideological position, and their potential impact on social attitudes towards the events. The data for this research is sampled from four widely read Spanish online newspapers: El País, El Mundo, ABC, and La Vanguardia. A cognitive linguistic approach to Critical Discourse Studies (CL-CDS; Hart, 2014) is employed with a focus on the linguistic and visual enactors of event-construal, including construal operations of schematisation and metaphor. The qualitative analysis of seventeen online news reports shows that different event construals reflect or instantiate the ideological positioning of these newspapers. However, a general narrative emerges from force-based schematisations (Talmy, 2000) which reflects the accomplishment of Spanish goals and an alignment between Spain and the EU.

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ORCID for Javier Marmol Queralto: orcid.org/0000-0002-9235-3289

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