Connotative analysis of Brexit discourse

The article is devoted to the current topic of Britain's exit from the European Union, considered through the prism of migration and intercultural communication, and the problem of the ambiguity of the interpretation of this event, represented in the discourse. The analysis of the background has shown the ambiguity of the Brexit situation, which is the reason for the differentiation in views on this event and is reflected in the use of emotionally coloured vocabulary in the texts. The aim of the research underlying this article is to study the emotional and evaluative content included in the semantics of collocations with the word Brexit. The novelty of the topic is dictated by the fact that the problem of Brexit is still at the stage of development and comprehension both in Britain and the European Union, and all over the world. In this regard, the Brexit discourse is also undergoing dynamic changes, which is confirmed by the corpus data and the results of the analysis of connotations. The analysis of the collocations of the word Brexit presented in the Corpus of Contemporary American English has revealed additional associative meanings with a strong emotional and evaluative connotation. As a result, the identified connotations are categorised, and three generalised groups of emotionally coloured expressions are described. The article describes the background knowledge of the issue of Britain's exit from the European Union, makes an excursion into the process of the development of British identity, influenced by the historical principle of the 'Anglosphere', and studies the preconditions for the split of opinions on Brexit, related to the attitude of locals to the large number of migrants, dictated by the strengthening of globalization processes in the context of the European Union, and, conversely, related to the problems for migrants that arose in connection with Brexit.