The Impact of Brexit on Tourism as Released by the Press: A Corpus-Driven Lexical Analysis

The tourism and hospitality industry is one of the sectors that could be significantly affected by the exit of the United Kingdom from the European Union. The potential consequences of the separation started to be echoed by the mass media as soon as the Leave result had been released. In this study, a corpus of online news counting 201,108 tokens and covering the immediate reactions to the Brexit referendum in the tourism sector is analysed using WordSmith tools with the aim to explore the lexical choice of the press to report on the impact of Brexit on tourism. Although the results of the analysis present a temporary overview of the situation, corresponding to the time span covered (from the immediate aftermath of the referendum to the beginning of 2018), both negative wordforms and their extended context evidence the negative consequences forecast for the economy in general, whereas the opposite effect is found for the tourism sector. In addition, there are instances of newly coined words such as Brexit, Brexiteer and Brexodus, and the top keywords manage to provide a clear account of the topic that answers the 5 Ws characterising the news genre. All in all, a pervasive sense of uncertainty and concern about the future after Brexit is perceived all along the samples.