CONSTRUCTING NATIONAL IDENTITY IN THE BRITISH PRESS: THE BRITAIN VERSUS EUROPE DICHOTOMY

Britain’s decision to leave the European Union (EU) not only marks a crucial point in its history and politics, it also evidences growing concern over issues such as British self-determination and national identity. It is therefore revealing to trace the contrasting contemporary media representations of Britain and Europe within the context of the EU membership referendum of 2016 and migration within the EU. Immigration, in its broadest sense, provides a basis for ideological debates about the nature of identity and self-representation. This corpus-based study analyses the discursive techniques employed by the national press in its representation of both Britain and Europe during the UK’s withdrawal from the EU in 2016–2018. The data represents a specialised corpus containing 500 editorials, opinion pieces and news reports from five British newspapers: The Guardian (The Observer) and The Mirror represent left-wing ideology, while The Daily Telegraph , The Daily Mail and The Sun represent right-wing ideology. In terms of methodology, the study applies a mixed-method approach that combines corpus-based analysis with a further examination of wider contexts and discourses. As a first step, the analysis focuses on the left-hand collocates of the words Britain versus Europe , as well as on the right-hand collocates of the adjectives British versus European and EU. As a further step, a concordance analysis of the most salient and distinctive collocates is used to identify the discourses constructed around these terms; the differences between the left-and right-wing newspapers are then analysed, and finally, the findings are situated in a broader socio-political context. The study uses this combination of methods to reveal how the British press creates the Britain versus Europe dichotomy. But we will avoid the same fate only if the state adopts a new approach on immigration , including more political honesty, tighter border controls and an emphasis on British values. That is not racist. ( The Sun , opinion piece, 2018-09-18; emphasis added)


Introduction
Since 2016 the United Kingdom (UK) and the European Union (EU) have been negotiating the UK's withdrawal from the EU. Founded after World War II upon the idea of a united and peaceful Europe and growing steadily since it was established in 1993 with its 12 original member states (Leonard & Taylor, 2016, pp. 4-8, 28), the EU has now experienced one of its members leaving for the first time. After entering a transition period that lasted until 2020-12-31, during which the future relationship between the EU and the UK was negotiated (European Commission, 2020), the UK finally officially left the EU on 2020-01-31, under Boris Johnson's leadership (2019-present) 1 . The question of why the majority of British people voted to leave the EU is frequently posed; Britain's decision to leave the EU not only marks a crucial point in its history and politics, it also evidences growing concern over issues such as British self-determination and national identity.
Analysing the contrasting contemporary media representations of Britain and Europe within the context of the EU membership referendum and migration within the EU might shed light on some of the factors that motivated the decision made by British voters in 2016. The press is one of the oldest forms of mass media and influences the construction of public discourses by selecting, transforming and contextualising socio-political events. The public usually obtains its knowledge of political events and decisions not from first-hand experience, but rather from the media. The British public's attitudes towards the EU were mainly constructed from media reports (Hughes, 2019, p. 40). Newspapers often act as intermediaries between national governments and politicians on the one hand and the public on the other (see Fowler, 1991;Hart, 2010, p. 17); they represent biased mediators that are capable of shaping public opinion (Islentyeva, 2021, p. 20).
This study aims to demonstrate how the British press constructed British national identity in the lead-up to the EU membership referendum on 2016-06-23, as well as in the period until 2019 during which the UK negotiated the terms of departure and future relations with the EU. The 500 articles collected for the newspaper corpus used in this study address issues such as EU migration, Europe and Brexit. The study applies a mixedmethod approach that combines corpus-based analysis with further investigation of broader contexts; a special focus is placed on the differences between left-and right-wing newspapers. This combination of methods reveals how the British press creates the Britain versus Europe dichotomy, in which British exceptionalism is foregrounded as something that stands in opposition to a united Europe.
First, we provide a brief historical and political background of the UK, looking at the British Empire, British exceptionalism, and the growing sense of British Euroscepticism. The notions of both British exceptionalism and Euroscepticism originated long before the founding of the EU and the emergence of the current debate. As a next step, the study introduces the methodological premises, highlighting the importance of a mixed-method approach for the analysis of media discourse and describing the design of the corpus used for this study. The subsequent linguistic analysis applies distinctive collexeme analysis to the right-hand collocates of British and EU, as well as to the right-hand collocates of British in the left-and right-wing newspapers and in the British National Corpus (BNC, 1991). The choice of the statistical method is explained in more detail in Section 3. Finally, the concordance analysis of the most salient collocates helps to further trace the discourses constructed around the analysed terms, placing the identified discursive patterns into a broader socio-political context.

Historical and political background: the British Empire, British exceptionalism and British euroscepticism
During his 2013 address, which later became known as the Bloomberg speech, British Prime Minister David Cameron (2010Cameron ( -2016 claimed: 'We have the character of an island nation' (Cameron, 2013). This address is remembered as the speech in which Cameron called for reform of the EU and committed a future Conservative government to holding a referendum on the UK's membership of the EU (see Wodak, 2016). This speech, just like the broader debate on EU membership itself, arose from a deep-rooted sense of British exceptionalism and a mounting sense of British Euroscepticism, a phenomenon whose roots can be traced back long before the EU came into being. These two phenomena can arguably be traced back both to Britain's relative geographical isolation as an island nation, as well as to its centuries of colonial and imperial rule.
After World War II, the British Nationality Act awarded British citizenship to more than 850 million people (Bhambra, 2016), and the British government invited the citizens of British territories to come to the UK to work (Tomlinson & Dorling, 2016). The British Empire was always a multicultural, multi-ethnic, and multi-religious society; given its immense size, it could not have been otherwise. Between 1948 and 1971, British citizens from Commonwealth countries came to the British Isles in search of work (Taylor, 2020, p. 6), and since then, the demographic make-up of Britain has become a microcosm of its once global empire (Bhambra, 2016). At the same time, in the early-to mid-twentieth century, the desire within the colonies for independence became stronger, and British influence around the world began to wane. This also put Britain in a politically and eco-nomically precarious position. The Empire disintegrated, giving way to the Commonwealth of Nations. The Commonwealth is nowhere near as powerful as it once was, but it is still an integral component of conservative British national identity. For example, Mycock (2010) points out that the Conservative Party has acknowledged the legacy of the British Empire as 'a policy aspiration'.
Euroscepticism and opposition to European integration can be traced back to the foundation of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) in 1951; some even go so far as to say that 'Britain is the home of the term Euroscepticism' (Spiering, 2004, p. 127). Euroscepticism is defined as 'a tendency to have doubts or reservations regarding the supposed benefits of increasing cooperation between the member states of the European Union; opposition to greater political or economic integration' (OED, 2008). Surprisingly, the concept of European unity was partly inspired by Prime Minister Winston Churchill (1940Churchill ( -45, 1951 himself. In 1946, he proposed 'a structure under which [Europe] can dwell in peace, in safety and in freedom [...] a kind of United States of Europe', and argued that Britain already had its 'own Commonwealth of Nations' (Churchill, 1946). However, when the ECSC was established in 1951, Britain declined the invitation to join. Later, Churchill reiterated his idea of a united Europe separate from Britain: 'We have our own dream and our own task. We are with Europe, but not of it. We are linked but not combined. We are interested and associated but not absorbed' (Churchill, 1953).
When the European Economic Community (EEC), the predecessor to the EU, was founded in 1957, Britain once again declined the invitation to join. By the end of the 1950s, however, the economic situation in Britain had become difficult to contain. With many former British colonies gaining independence and the accompanying Suez Crisis, Britain struggled to keep up with mainland Europe's economic recovery, and ultimately opted to join the EEC in the hope of halting its economic decline (Jones, 2017, p. 13-16). Britain's first application for membership was vetoed by France in 1961; France also vetoed the UK's second application in 1967, fearing that Britain would be more loyal to the US than to its European neighbours. After finally managing to join the EEC in 1973, Britain failed to experience a rapid economic recovery, which led to a first referendum on the country's membership being held in 1975, and a number of parliamentary votes were carried out on individual treaties pertaining to the extent of European integration. In the 1980s, Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (1979-1990) adopted a sceptical position towards European integration (Hardt-Mautner, 1995). Thatcher managed to secure more advantageous terms for Britain's membership in the EEC: for instance, in 1985, the UK rebate, the reduction of the UK's contribution to the European budget, was ratified and implemented (Daddow, 2013).
In contrast to Churchill's notion of a United States of Europe, Britain viewed European integration as a 'pragmatic and utilitarian foreign policy stripped of a normat-ive commitment to the European ideal of ever closer union' (Glencross, 2014, p. 8). During its time as an EU member state, Britain never integrated to the same extent as other countries, refusing to join both the Schengen area and the Eurozone. However, this policy of self-exclusion ultimately proved unsustainable, especially as Brussels's goal increasingly contradicted the ideology of British Eurosceptics. The Eurosceptic narrative constructed a nationalistic discourse that positioned Europe as the other that stood in opposition to British interests and identities. This discourse stands in fundamental and principled opposition to the European integration project (Gifford, 2006, p. 864).
The issue of Britain's membership of the EU became a political powder keg, and Prime Minister Cameron included it in the Conservative Party's election manifesto for the 2015 UK General Election. Matters of national sovereignty, freedom of movement, immigration, and border control were the primary motives for the referendum on EU membership; Saunders (2016, p. 320) points out that sovereignty and immigration were very strong campaign issues. With the rise of the right-wing populist UKIP party, core issues of the European single market became a polarising argument in the debate on leaving the EU. One of the 'four freedoms' in particular (in addition to the free movement of both goods and capital, and the freedom to establish and provide services) became increasingly polarised: the free movement of EU citizens and the resulting equal treatment of British citizens and other EU citizens in terms of employment, taxes, welfare, and other social issues (Vasilopoulou, 2016, p. 219). The Conservative strategy during the Brexit debate intensively focused on issues of migration and was thus promoted by the media (Islentyeva, 2018(Islentyeva, , 2021. Previously published studies have shown that this strategy was very successful among older voters with a lower socio-economic status and those who were especially concerned about immigration and the concomitant "multi-culturalisation" of British society (Hobolt, 2016(Hobolt, , p. 1260. On a cultural level, most British voters -and especially the English -did not feel affiliated with the EU. The Leave campaign was able to convince these voters that membership of the EU was incompatible with their national identity, and thus linked nationalism and Euroscepticism for the purposes of their election campaign (Henderson, Lineaira, Scully, Wincott & Wyn Jones, 2016, p. 198). As parliamentary debates have shown, the Remain campaign claimed that staying in the EU would be a pragmatic economic step, whereas the Leave campaign framed the EU as an "oppressive force" that prevented Britain from thriving as a global power. However, both sides stressed British sovereignty and exceptionalism (Wenzl, 2019, p. 44)

Methodological framework: employing a mixed-method approach
This section elaborates on the advantages of combining corpus-linguistic methods with discourse analysis, especially when it comes to analysing media discourse. There are also a growing number of publications (Baker, 2006;Partington, Duguid & Taylor, 2013;Taylor & Marchi, 2018) that successfully combine these two methods in different ways.
Corpus-linguistic methods can be particularly useful in instances where analysts aim to trace recurring patterns and discursive trends in larger corpora: keyword, collocational and concordance analyses help to identify recurrent patterns that cannot always be identified by close reading a limited number of pre-selected texts. In its turn, a detailed discourse analysis provides insight into various levels of discourse structure, and also requires an in-depth knowledge of the current social and political climate. In the case of the media study presented here, it is especially important that one understands the current socio-political situation in the UK with regard to Europe, migration within the EU, and Brexit, as well as pays special attention to the political stance of a given newspaper and the discourse (re)produced within it.
The analysis of context -both the linguistic and broader socio-political context -is one of the key methods in the contemporary study of discourses. In corpus linguistics, collocational analysis constitutes one of the basic forms of analysis that is employed in a wide range of studies. A collocate is a word that regularly occurs next to or in close proximity to a word under investigation, which is often referred to as a node word (McEnery & Hardie, 2012, p. 123). A span of five words to the left and to the right (+/− 5 words) of a node word is the typical span used for identifying collocates. In the analysis featured here, the focus is, however, placed on the adjectives and nouns that immediately precede or follow the words under investigation, namely Britain and Europe, and British, European and EU.
As a first step, a distinctive collexeme analysis (Gries & Stefanowitsch, 2004), which represents one of three types of collostructional analysis, is applied to the direct righthand collocates of the word pair British and EU, using the R-package Collostructions (Flach, 2017). Collostructional analysis is a family of statistical methods developed by Stefanowitsch and Gries that are designed to measure the degree of attraction or repulsion that words exhibit in relation to various constructions. At present, collostructional analysis comprises three interrelated methods: simple collexeme analysis (Stefanowitsch & Gries, 2003), distinctive collexeme analysis, and covarying collexeme analysis (Stefanowitsch & Gries, 2005). Importantly, distinctive collexeme analysis was designed to investigate "pairs of semantically similar grammatical constructions and the lexemes that occur in them" (Gries & Stefanowitsch, 2004, p. 97). In the case of our study, collocations such as British people and EU migrants are regarded as similar grammatical constructions, and distinctive collexeme analysis is especially insightful as it shows which right-hand collocates exhibit a strong preference for British as opposed to EU. As a second step, the identified collocates are divided into relevant semantic groups -for example, words denoting a sense of belonging to a group (people, voters, etc) or representing values (values, culture, etc) -and investigated in more detail via a concordance analysis.
A collexeme analysis is then also applied to the right-hand collocates of the adjective British in the left-and right-wing newspapers, which helps to identify the most significant collocates and thus the relevant discourses representing left-and right-wing ideologies. Finally, a collexeme analysis is applied to the right-hand collocates of British in the BNC (1991) and compared with a similar analysis of the newspaper corpus under investigation in order to identify differences between the meaning of British in the general corpus of English (BNC) and a specialised corpus that foregrounds differences between British and (EU) migrants. The following section provides an overview of the specialised newspaper corpus employed in this study and highlights the significance and relevance of this corpus for the study of media representations of (British) national identity.

Political allegiances of the British press, the Specialised Newspaper Corpus and its significance for the present study
The linguistic data employed in this study represents a monolingual and monogeneric corpus of 500 newspaper articles published between 2016 and 2018 in five British newspapers. Each subcorpus (newspaper) contains 100 articles, and the division into text types is quite balanced: around 50 per cent of the data is comprised of news reports, whereas the other 50 per cent is divided evenly between editorials and opinion pieces. One of the research goals of this study is to trace the discursive differences (and similarities) between how British national identity is constructed in the British left-and right-wing press. The articles in question were taken from newspapers that are representative of different ideologies; British press outlets have expressed their political allegiances in every general election since 1945 by backing one of the major parties in their editorials and opinion pieces (Butler & Butler 2000: 536;Islentyeva 2019: 213;Islentyeva 2021: 21). In the corpus used for this study, The Guardian (and The Observer) and The Daily Mirror represent left-wing or progressive ideology, while The Daily Telegraph, The Daily Mail and The Sun represent right-wing or conservative ideology. Moreover, The Telegraph and The Guardian represent the so-called quality press or broadsheets, while The Mail, The Sun and The Mirror are known as popular press or tabloids. The Sun, The Mail and The Guardian are the three most widely-read newspapers in the UK. Table 1 displays the average monthly print and digital readership of the five newspapers in question as of November 2018, since the corpus contains articles from 2016 to 2018.  The data in the corpus encompasses the six months before and the two and a half years after the EU membership referendum that was held on 2016-06-23. It is worth mentioning that this corpus was initially designed to conduct research into migration discourse in the contemporary British press (Islentyeva, 2021) and therefore primarily contains articles regarding migration within Europe and Brexit negotiations between the UK and the EU. The search terms for the corpus were restricted to such words as migrant(s), immigrant(s), migration, immigration, EU, Europe and Brexit. One hundred of the most popular articles from each newspaper were retrieved from the official websites of the aforementioned newspapers, downloaded as plain text files and sorted according to the newspaper from which they were extracted, with one file for each newspaper. The corpus was annotated with the help of a part-of-speech TreeTagger (Schmid, 1994), which enables the search for all forms of a word by inputting its lemma. The analysis of the corpus was carried out with the help of Corpus Query Processor (CQP). The corpus also proved to have shed some light on how the media constructs concepts of Britain and British identity within the context of EU migration. Notions of a border-free Europe and the mobility of its citizens raise questions not only of national identity, but also of British exceptionalism, which has historically stood in opposition to the vision of a united Europe. Spiering (2015, p. 6) argues that national identities are relational; in order to define who we are, we seek to distinguish ourselves from others. For example, in their quest to forge their own identity, the English tend to define themselves in contrast to the Scots, the Welsh, and the Irish by claiming to hold a special position within Britain. Immigrants and other ethnic and religious minorities represent another big out-group, followed by mainland Europeans, who function as 'significant others in the English quest for the national self' (Spiering, 2015, p. 6). The corpus used in this study, which contains articles on EU migration, provides a solid basis for discussions about the nature of British national identity and self-representation, with a special focus on the differences between left-and right-wing ideologies.

Corpus analysis and discussion
The comparative analysis outlined here traces the differences and similarities in terms of how British national identity is constructed in the British left-versus right-wing press within the context of EU migration discourse. Table 3 provides the raw frequencies of Britain, British, Europe, European and EU and the number of tokens in each subcorpus of the newspaper corpus. Table 4 provides the normalised frequencies of the words under investigation per 10,000 words in order to compare their distribution in the subcorpora.   Both the left-and right-wing newspapers frequently employ the terms Britain (36.5 and 38.7 occurrences per 10,000 words) and British (13.4 and 15.6 occurrences per 10,000 words). In (corpus) linguistics, where we are often interested in comparing the frequencies of the words under investigation, the chi-test (x 2 ) is especially useful as it enables us to compare the frequencies we actually observe with those that we should expect on the basis of a hypothesis about the distribution of the characteristics concerned (Oakes, 1998, p. 112  In our qualitative analysis, let us first take a closer look at the right-wing press, which attempts to construct a systematic binary opposition between Britain and Europe (cf. Hardt-Mautner 1995, Spiering 2015 The right-wing press often refers to Europe as a monolith, as if it were a single state or country, while severely criticising and mocking the idea of European unity and freedom of movement. Being part of the EU is also depicted as an economic burden shouldered by British taxpayers, and Brussels is portrayed as a rival force that is taking control away from the UK (Islentyeva, 2019) -see also When discussing EU migration, the right-wing press often conceptualises Britain as a MAGNET for Europeans, especially for low-skilled and unskilled workers ("cheap labour") from Eastern Europe (see Islentyeva, 2018;Islentyeva, 2021, pp. 96-107). Furthermore, in contrast to Europe, Britain is often represented as superior and capable of finding more effective solutions to immigration and asylum issues: (7) Britain has found a better way. We shall continue to welcome workers from Europe but we shall do so on our terms. A closer look at the concordances from the left-wing press shows that The Guardian argues that remaining in the EU is vital for Britain's economic and cultural prosperity. As part of Europe, Britain is described as a tolerant, outward-looking, progressive, technologically advanced, and socially liberal place, whereas Brexit Britain is portrayed as an insular and inward-looking island nation preoccupied with curtailing foreigners' legal right to settle there: (9) Instead we should be putting our shoulders to the task of building a democratic, devolved, multicultural Britain with a fair deal for all, connected to the world and working with our In the left-wing press, Europe is represented as a union of nations that is successfully working together to achieve its goals, while Britain is seen as a country whose development has been influenced by Europe and that shares the same values as its European neighbours. While the left-wing publications acknowledge that there are flaws in the way the EU is structured and led, they repeatedly emphasise their view that it would be better for Britain to remain a member of the EU. Europe's status as the UK's largest trading partner and closest neighbour is also referred to, and cooperation between the two entities is depicted as vital:  Table 6 provides the results of a distinctive collexeme analysis, listing the fifteen most salient right-hand collocates that are attracted to the words British and EU respectively, in both the left-and right-wing newspapers. Columns 3 and 4 provide the observed and expected frequencies for the collates of British, columns 5 and 6 give the observed and expected collocates of EU, columns 7 and 8 provide collostructional strength and statistical significance, respectively. Collostructional strength is measured using the log-likelihood test (Oakes, 1998, p. 42). In terms of statistical significance, ***** is significant at p < 0.00001, **** is significant p < 0.0001, *** is significant at p <0.001, ** is significant at p <0.01, and * is significant at p<0.05. The last column indicates whether a collocate is shared by both terms under investigation. The distinctive collexeme analysis thus enables the identification of the most salient collocates and provides a basis for the further contextual analysis of the most distinctive collocates, and identification of the dominant discourses produced in the press.   European that can be compared to right-hand collocates of British. Our research has revealed that the press has predominantly resorted to using the shortened form EU. Let us refer to Table 6 once again: The most salient collocate of British is people (84), 2 which also happens to be among the keywords that are frequently employed in populist discourses. The word people refers to a unified entity, especially with the use of the definite determiner (see Kranert, 2019;Stefanowitsch, 2019). The collocation the British people occurs 48 times in the right-wing newspapers, especially in the context of discussing the will, wish, verdict, or decision of the British people. In most cases, it is a reference to the Brexit referendum and its outcome: The collocation British society (12) is used exclusively in the right-wing publications in the corpus under investigation; the term is not as inclusive and all-encompassing as the British people. The right-wing press clearly contrasts the collocation with migrants by repeatedly referring to the issue of integrating into British society. Similarly, the collocation British voters (11) is mostly found in the right-wing press (8 occurrences) and is employed in the context of British voters competing with immigrants for jobs, housing and health care: (19) It was a smear that silenced furious British voters as they found themselves squeezed out of jobs, housing and health care by the influx of millions of people. (The Sun, opinion piece, 2017-09-11; emphasis added)

Rank
When it comes to the British economy, the discursive patterns produced in the leftversus right-wing newspapers represent two extremes: The right-wing press claims that the British economy can survive without the UK remaining a member of the EU -in fact, it will even benefit from the withdrawal and a halt to immigration: Similar discursive patterns can be observed with the collocation British jobs (7). The rightwing press demands that British jobs go to British workers, a slogan ('British jobs for British workers') that was initially coined by former Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown (2007-2010).
(23) British jobs will have to be offered to British workers [...] EU jobseekers will be banned entirely as they must have a guaranteed job before they come here. (The Telegraph, news report, 2017-09-05; emphasis added) The left-wing press, on the other hand, argues that British jobs heavily rely on the European market: (24) 'Two thirds of British jobs in manufacturing are dependent on demand from Europe' says Labour's Alan Johnson. (The Mirror, news report, 2016-06-18; emphasis added) Similar argumentative patterns can be observed regarding the collocation British business(es) (11), which is primarily found in the left-wing newspapers. The left-wing press argues that British businesses rely on foreign labour and that Brexit would have a damaging impact on them: (25) Migrant workers contribute to our economy and to British culture -we should be welcoming them in the traditional spirit of British tolerance. Leave Means Leave clearly don't understand why British business relies on migrant workers. (The Guardian, news report, 2017-04-09; emphasis added) (26) Recent research shows that more than half of British businesses are struggling to recruit the skilled labour they need. 'This Government must act urgently to give assurances to skilled and hard-working EU citizens, before any more damage is done to our already weakened economy.' (The Mirror, news report, 2017-08-24; emphasis added)  As Table 8 shows, economic terms such as business (5) and labour (2), as well as Future (6) and children (2) are among the distinctive collocates of British in the left-wing subcorpus. The collocation British Future is the name of a UK-based think tank. In the right-wing subcorpus, terms that constitute part of national identity, such as values (18) and society (12) are the most salient collocates of British. Three other salient collocates (Muslims, population and Sikhs) refer to people. It is worth mentioning that the way the right-wing me-dia reports on British Muslims (6) and British Sikhs (3) is also connected to the act of othering, even if these collocations are provided in the context of integration into British society and the representation of Muslims in the British press is particularly biased (Gabrielatos, Baker & McEnery, 2013).

Rank
(27) 'This in turn helps to feed a grievance narrative promoted by extremist groups who want to drive a wedge between British Muslims and the rest of British society. So, we need a more honest conversation about all this in the mainstream, in a way that helps bind people back together again, not drive them apart.' (The Telegraph, news report, 2016-12-05;emphasis added) 1 mandate in British history to take back control over our laws,our immigration 2 MOST of Britain now wants to take back control over immigration. But yester 3 ate seized the first chance to take back control of our borders. As if that w 4 n out of the single market and take back control of our borders. The UK needs 5 ursday. Third, our plan will take back control of our laws. We will no long 6ORDER CONTROL Britain will take back control its borders for the first tim 7 who comes here ' BRITAIN will take back control of its borders for the first 8 to LBC, Mrs May said they ``take back control of our borders, brings an en 9 ferendum. The public voted to take back control . At the very least, it dese 10 ear not just that Britain will take back control of its borders, but how. MP 11 derstandable that we should ``take back control of our borders''. It has be 12 rs who voted Leave in order to take back control of immigration policy. And 13 eflects a view that we will ``take back control ' over immigration policy 14 of Brexit wo n't be that we ``take back control ' of our borders, as the pr 15 omised the British public -we take back control of our immigration policy. 1 6 hould form part of plans to ``take back control of migration from the EU''.  When it comes to the distinctive collocates of the word EU (displayed in Table 6), a number of references are also made to people: for example, migrants (175), nationals (141), citizens (229), and immigrants (8). It is worth pointing out that the collocations EU citizens (132) and EU nationals (82) proved to be more frequent than EU migrants (61) in the leftwing subcorpus, whereas the right-wing press predominantly uses EU migrants (120) (Islentyeva, 2021, p. 107-113). These findings also correspond with corpus-based studies that showed that the right-wing press mainly refers to EU citizens as unskilled or lowskilled migrant workers who compete with British employees (Islentyeva, 2021, p. 98, 103;Stefanowitsch & Scheffler, 2020). This discourse is closely related to the idea of taking back control of Britain's economy -as well as British borders and immigration policy -as is illustrated by the concordances of the pattern take back control in Table 9. The slogan Take back control was first introduced by the Leave campaign (Vote Leave Campaign 2021) and swiftly adopted by the right-wing press. The official Leave campaign portrays the EU as an opponent of Britain and calls for regaining control of UK law, trade, human rights, and migration. The corresponding pattern in the right-wing press is represented by recurrent collocates such as our laws, our/Britain's borders, our immigration policy and migration from the EU. The EU is portrayed as taking control from the UK (see Islentyeva, 2019), while migrants are framed as both a threat to and a burden on Britain (see Islentyeva, 2018Islentyeva, , 2021  As is the case with the collocation British society, which is contrasted with migrants by way of recurrent references to the issue of integration into British society, the collocation British values likewise frequently occurs in contexts regarding integration, with an emphasis on the fact that migrants should be taught British values and expected to uphold them. Democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty, and tolerance are often cited in The Sun, The Mail and The Telegraph as 'core British values'. As for the most distinctive collocates of British in the BNC (1991), the list in Table 10 contains a number of UK companies and other entities such as British Rail, British Telecom, British Airways, British Museum, and British Library. In the context of the study presented here, it is relevant to mention that the collocation British Empire (172) belongs to the 15 most salient collocations of general British English.

Conclusion
This corpus-based study has shed some light on the ways in which the media has framed and constructed concepts of British national identity within the context of the EU referendum, with an emphasis placed on the differences between the discursive methods employed by the left-and right-wing newspapers included in the corpus analysed here. Analysing discourses around Europe and Europeans not only demonstrates how Europe and EU citizens are represented in the British press, but also provides information on the discourses surrounding British identity.
The construction of British national identity did not begin during Brexit or with Cameron's Bloomberg speech -it started much earlier. With the introduction of national borders come national identities. National identities are not necessarily dangerous constructs in and of themselves, but they are liable to become dangerous when they are fused with privilege and entail the exclusion of other people -in this case the exclusion of immigrants and migrants from Europe and elsewhere. Bhambra (2017) argues that Britain was never a nation, but rather was always an empire, and 'the vote for Brexit is a vote that represents the delayed resentment at the loss of Empire and at the loss of privileges associated with Empire'.
As the analysis presented here has shown, the right-wing press systematically creates a binary opposition in an attempt to ensure the distinction between Britain and Europe, as well as between the people and values of Britain versus those of Europe, with recurrent references made to British people and their will, British society, the British public, British economy and British values. Within this discourse, Britain does not belong to Europe; on the contrary, it is portrayed as a victim of Brussels and of domineering European rule. Brexit Britain, on the other hand, is depicted as a global player that can keep up as a world economy. In any case, British identity is distinct from European identity, which is framed in terms of EU migrants, EU citizens, EU workers, and EU labour; prominent points thus revolve around the British economy and British immigration policy. The process of othering, in which British identity is seen as the standard and anything that deviates from it is marginalised and should thus be assimilated into British society, is one of the key discursive strategies employed by the right-wing press. When it comes to the economy, the discursive patterns produced in the left-versus right-wing newspapers represent two ex-tremes: The right-wing press claims that the British economy will benefit from the country's withdrawal from the EU and a halt to immigration, whereas the left-wing press highlights the EU's status as Britain's largest trading partner and closest neighbour.
It could be argued that the discourse (re)produced by the right-wing press influenced the decision of British voters to vote in favour of leaving the EU, although the exact extent to which the British media was involved in this process cannot be definitively determined. Due to its higher circulation figures (see Table 1), the right-wing press reaches a wider audience than the left-wing newspapers, which allows it to form and spread dominant discourse in contemporary Britain. It should also be emphasised that the leftwing newspapers often lack their own corresponding discursive patterns that are able to fully contrast the narratives of the right. Instead of producing their own discursive frameworks, the left-wing press primarily discusses and criticises the patterns employed and developed by the right-wing press, thus reproducing them (cf. Islentyeva 2021: 86). The left-wing press should use its language in such a way that it develops its own corresponding discursive patterns, thus allowing it to be distinguished more clearly from the right and provide an alternative to nationalist narratives and discourses.
In terms of scope for further research, the source of linguistic data employed here could be expanded to include data from different periods, as well as from social media platforms. The search patterns could include a wide range of terms such as UK citizens, UK nationals, Brits, and Britons. Possessive pronouns are also of great interest; words like our versus their or Britain's/UK's versus Europe's should clarify questions of ownership and belonging. Additionally, a focus on British nationals and citizens living abroad in EU countries or British nationals in Northern Ireland might offer an even more comprehensive insight into how national identity is constructed. In this regard, one could also look at the differences between the other constituent countries of the UK and analyse how and to what extent Scottish, Welsh and English identities influence the mainstream British one. Furthermore, research on other countries' representation in contrast to the EU would be of great interest, possibly comparing countries that are generally considered to constitute the "heart" of the EU, such as Germany or France, with countries that are commonly known to be Eurosceptic, like Greece or Hungary.