Introduction

Goffman's (1978, p 813) famous dictum that provides the chapter's title followed by Sacks (1992 [1972], p 572), who pointed out that ‘we won't find that strong sorrow and joy are just distributed over the course of the conversation but instead, there are real places for them to occur’, and Jefferson (1988), who among other things, studied the ways in which talk about troubles makes relevant affiliative responses, pave the way for a research avenue that considers emotion as a relevant aspect of the organisation and structure of discourse.

The aim of this chapter is to analyse the conceptualisation of selected key terms of the referendum debate in the UK by identifying accessible patterns of language use. Available evidence suggests that displays of emotion in the language of top agents seem to be crucial in institutional and formal settings and in various modalities of expression (spoken and written), including grammar but to the exclusion of prosodic features, facial expressions or body gestures.

Provided that language can be viewed as a collective repository of memory chunks linked to units of conceptual knowledge such as schemas, categories and conceptual metaphors, and metonymies or blends, lexical concepts used in two selected speeches will be seen as exponents of discursively constructed ideas and values. Different constructions of British interests currently centre around concepts such as sovereignty, identity, immigration and economics, and it does not come as a surprise that in the context of Brexit, some top agents in politics and the media in particular view Britain as the victim at the hands of the EU, appealing to ‘the people’ to take back (power) control from the government and the elite or encouraging ‘our great country’ to rely on its strength and determination. The construction of ‘the people’ versus ‘the government’ or ‘the elite’ is an ordinary ‘us’ or ‘self ‘ versus ‘them’ or ‘other’ construction where common unity (or disunity) and consensus (or dissent) is invoked through populist discourse (see section Theoretical orientations: discourse, meaning, language use on polarity-indicating and polarity-evoking devices and section Conclusion on populism).