Brexit in British and German Political Discourse

Patrycja Kubicha is a doctor of linguistics and a graduate of English and German philology. She currently works as a research and teaching employee at the Institute of Linguistics and Literary Studies at the Faculty of Humanities of Jan Kochanowski University of Kielce, at which she completed her philological studies and wrote and defended her PhD dissertation. She is particularly interested in conducting research in the area of linguistic pragmatics, and she is the author of articles concerning pragmatic analyses of chosen texts belonging to political discourse.

Patrycja Kubicha jest doktorem językoznawstwa i absolwentką filologii angielskiej i germańskiej. Obecnie jest pracownikiem badawczo-dydaktycznym w Instytucie Literaturoznawstwa i Językoznawstwa na Wydziale Humanistycznym Uniwersytetu Jana Kochanowskiego w Kielcach, na którym ukończyła studia filologiczne oraz napisała i obroniła pracę doktorską. Szczególnie interesuje się prowadzeniem badań z zakresu pragmatyki językoznawczej i jest autorką artykułów dotyczących analiz pragmatycznych wybranych tekstów należących do dyskursu politycznego.

This monograph is a revised version of the authors PhD dissertation. It presents an analysis of chosen Brexit speeches given by politicians from British and German parties. The speeches were delivered during debates at the parliaments of the UK and Germany. The study is concerned with whether the thematic and linguistic similarities between the speeches depend rather on the political orientation of the particular parties or on which of the two countries a given party comes from. In the case of the British parties, speeches by members of the Conservative Party (center-right), the Labour Party (center-left), and the Democratic Unionist Party (right-wing) were analyzed, while in the case of the German parties, speeches by politicians from the Christian Democratic Union and Christian Social Union (center-right), the Social Democratic Party of Germany (center-left), and the Alternative for Germany (far-right) were studied. The research was conducted in the context of Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilsons relevance theory. In order to perform it, Laurence Anthonys program AntConc and the software Microsoft Excel were used.