The Brexit campaign in British tabloids: The role of passives in the process of positive self- and negative other-presentation

Abstract This paper examines the local syntax in 65 articles from the British mid-market tabloids, the Daily Mail and the Daily Express, covering the pre-Brexit vote period (February-June 2016). The paper focuses on the passive constructions in the chosen corpus and the main objective is to examine their role and function in a traditionally conservative and anti-EU discourse through an analysis of the sampled data set within the qualitative theoretical and methodological framework of CDA. The results point at an intricate network of both agentless and passives with agents contributing to both positive self-presentation and negative other-presentation as the dominant strategies of manipulation in the examined discourse. This paper is part of the AILA Europe special issue.