Aktivne učesničke uloge Ujedinjenog Kraljevstva u britanskom medijskom diskursu nakon referenduma 2016. godine: radnje ili ipak ne?
Active Participant Roles of the United Kingdom in the British Post-Referendum 2016 Media Discourse: Truly Active or Not?

Summary/Abstract: This paper explores the representation of Britain as a social actor in active participant roles in the British media between the Brexit referendum 2016 and early 2020, when the country formally withdrew from the EU. The corpus consists of editorials from the left-liberal daily The Guardian and the rightleaning The Daily Mail. The research is conducted as a CDA, drawing primarily on van Leeuwen’s (2008) model of social actor representation. The goal of the research is to explore whether the identified active participant roles are genuinely active, which verbs predominate, and how this kind of social actor encoding corresponds with (already known) ideological positions of the selected newspapers and within the broader situational and social context. Although Britain is mentioned more frequently in The Guardian than in The Daily Mail (1270 vs. 625 occurrences) and is assigned a greater number of active participant roles (238 vs. 86), the findings indicate that The Guardian represents Britain as an isolated social actor with limited power. Moreover, the frequent use of modal verbs, particularly in material clauses, indicates an implicit negation of activity. In The Daily Mail, on the other hand, Britain is represented as an active social actor who is, by leaving the EU, building a “bright future” for itself and “taking back control”. The Daily Mail constructs an image of a nation and country unthreatened by Brexit economically. Britain is also represented as a “revolutionary” and “a true protector of European values and democracy”. These values or economic benefits are, however, never clearly defined.

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