THE LANGUAGE OF BREXIT

by STEVE BUCKLEDEE

  Sites like the three indicated in the previous paragraph do an important job but for a relatively small number of visitors. For a wider public to understand that Britain is not paralysed by EU red tape but is actually a low-bureaucracy nation, high-profile Remainers whose faces were known to TV viewers needed to launch a vigorous attack on the claim that having to comply with ‘every jot and tittle’ was stifling the economy. In general, they did not do so, and, as in the case of the EU’s alleged lack of democracy and accountability, Leave supporters were rarely challenged when they talked of setting Britain free from ‘the stranglehold of the EU superstate’.

  7

  Nominalization, presupposition and naturalization

  Nominalization is quite simply the formation of a noun or noun phrase from some other word class. In English this conversion sometimes requires the use of a derivational affix, for instance from the verb develop to the noun development, or from the adjective safe to the noun safety. With other lexical items there is no morphological transformation: rise and fall are both verbs and nouns, the adjectives rich and poor can be used as plural nouns preceded by the definite article (The rich get rich, the poor get children), and top can be a noun, an ungradable adjective or a verb.

  Sometimes it makes little difference to the overt or implicit meaning of an utterance whether we use a verb phrase – Fleming discovered penicillin in 1928 – or a noun phrase – Fleming’s discovery of penicillin in 1928. That is not always the case, however; in the verb phrase Watson and Crick discovered the structure of DNA, the focus is on the identity of the discoverers, and begs the question, And what about Rosalind Franklin? (the chemist now believed to have been denied the recognition she deserved because she was a woman working in a field that was then an almost exclusively male preserve). In the sentence, Watson, Crick and Wilkins’ discovery of the structure of DNA resulted in their sharing the Nobel prize in 1962, the focus is on the Nobel prize and the initial noun phrase – discovery preceded by three genitive nouns (the names of the scientists) – is taken as given. Since the Nobel Commissions are not known for being duped by impostors or charlatans, the presupposition is that the fact that it was Watson, Crick and Wilkins (and no one else) who made the major scientific breakthrough is not disputed. In the right hands nominalization and presupposition can be very powerful tools in the art of persuasion. As Machin and Mayr put it (2012: 137):

  Nominalisation typically replaces verb processes with a noun construction, which can obscure agency and responsibility for an action, what exactly happened and when it took place. Presupposition is one skilful way by which authors are able to imply meanings without overtly stating them, or present things as taken for granted and stable when in fact they may be contestable and ideological.

  A presupposition may be created on a single occasion for a specific issue. Naturalization is when a notion is repeated via various media until it becomes ‘common sense’, something that appears to be so self-evident that no one would ever challenge it. Or rather, it goes unchallenged by people who do not read between the lines to question whether the notion concerned is really a universally accepted truth and not an ideologically-driven position that does not represent the real interests of the people encouraged to accept it. Lesley Jeffries (2010: 9) offers the following examples: (i) children should not be made to work; (ii) it is a good thing for women to be slim. The first is an ideological stance that enjoys wide consensus in the advanced economies today but would not be shared by families in the developing world who depend on their children’s wages, while the second might invite a challenge when stated boldly on-record but when it is implicit in texts of many kinds ‘we have trouble rejecting it in our own minds, particularly if we are female’ (ibid.). To add a third example, strikes are invariably portrayed as a bad thing in the mainstream media, and news reports refer to the danger of escalation, loss of production, further disruption and the like. Most people would not register anything unusual about the use of the noun danger in the previous sentence, but they would certainly sit up and take notice if the newsreader replaced it with the word hope. To anyone who has ever been on strike, and therefore knows that it is not a step that workers take lightly, escalation, loss of production and further disruption are the desired consequences.

  To return to presupposition, logical presuppositions may be triggered by change-of-state verbs – verbs that indicate a switch from one state to another, one action to another or between action and inaction – and also by temporal adverbs. For example:

  She quit as chief executive (Logical presupposition: she was chief executive before)

  He used to live in Birmingham (Logical presupposition: but now he doesn’t)

  It doesn’t hurt anymore (Logical presupposition: but it did before)

  I no longer trust him (Logical presupposition: in the past I trusted him)

  Another trigger of logical presuppositions is the use of factive verbs, such as know, discover, admit, recognize, confirm, remember, learn, regret and realize. A factive verb presupposes the veracity of its clausal complement, which is usually a that-clause:

  We know that the emission of greenhouse gases is causing global warming

  (Presupposition: the link between greenhouse gases and global warming is not disputed)

  My staff have discovered a plot to promulgate fake news to undermine my presidency

  (Presupposition: the plot exists and the key information is that it has been discovered)

  She never realized that her husband was having an affair

  (Presupposition: the wife’s perspicacity is in doubt, not the husband’s infidelity)

  Not all climate change deniers are oil lobbyists or Tea Party activists; there are also scientists who genuinely believe that rising temperatures are part of a natural cyclical trend unrelated to human activity. An alleged plot to promulgate fake news might say more about the president’s paranoia than the wickedness of his/her political opponents, while it is not at all unusual in a marriage for one partner to imagine that the other is having an affair. However, the verbs know, discovered and realized in these examples give the impression that the propositions expressed in the clausal complements are established facts. In effect, factive verbs do the opposite of the hedging strategies and use of modality considered in Chapter 2.

  A distinction is often made between verb phrases as processes or actions and noun phrases as entities. A verb phrase states or asserts something, and if we don’t agree with the proposition we can contest it. An entity, by definition, exists, and the assumption, or presupposition, with a noun phrase is that it is something real or true, so it is far more likely to go unchallenged than a verb phrase is (as we saw with example of the discovery of the structure of DNA). Nominalization is therefore a very useful tool for those in the business of trying to convince people that an ideological stance is actually an objective fact. As Lesley Jeffries (2010: 21) puts it: ‘The way in which this basic truth about sentences in English can be exploited for ideological or other effect is by putting the processes/actions and so on into a nominal structure, and thus no longer asserting them, but assuming them.’

  Let us consider the following assertions about the European Union:

  It is a political project. This project is undemocratic. It is utopian. The project has been advanced by lies and by deceit. The British don’t want and don’t love this project. Increasingly, most ordinary Europeans don’t want and don’t love it.

  Here we have six short sentences. The first four each contain a finite verb and the fifth and sixth have two. When the assertions are expressed in this way, a well-informed Remainer would have little difficulty in picking them off one by one. Long before we knew there was going to be a referendum, Alison Little (2013), writing for the Sunday Express, quoted the UKIP MEP Gerrard Batten, who expressed precisely the same views as follows:

  It is an undemocratic, utopian, political project advanced by lies and deceit – unwanted and unloved by the British and increasingly by most or
dinary Europeans.

  Now we have just one sentence, and after the copular verb is at the beginning there are no more finite verbs. The subject It has the subject complement project, which is premodified by three adjectives. It is also postmodified by two passive constructions involving three nonfinite verbs, the past participles advanced, unwanted and unloved. The most contentious element is the reference to lies and deceit, but the use of the passive voice means that we do not know who to accuse of lying and deceiving us. The entire subject complement is packaged up as a complex noun phrase featuring both pre- and postmodification. What was asserted in six short sentences is assumed in one long entity.

  Obviously this does not mean that Gerrard Batten’s position on the EU cannot be contested, but with so many attacks delivered in such a condensed form, and in the context of a debate conducted in real time, it would probably not be possible to counter more than one of them. As it happens, his words were part of a written text, his foreword to a report by the pro-Brexit economist Tim Congdon, so a systematic written rebuttal would be possible, but it would not be equally succinct and punchy.

  In Congdon’s report (2016) the cost to the UK of EU membership is calculated to be £170 billion a year, and in the same article Alison Little quotes him as claiming that the single biggest cost comes from ‘120,000 pages of EU law, including job-reducing employment regulations, green energy policies and financial regulations’. The premodifier job-reducing applies to all three nominal groups that follow. It is an unusual adjectival form constructed from a noun and a present participle, and appears to have been used to make contradiction less likely. More conventional constructions using the verb reduce would invite challenges: employment regulations tend to preserve jobs rather than reduce them, investment in alternative energy probably creates jobs, while it is debatable whether financial regulations have much impact one way or the other on employment.

  Moving on to the texts produced once the referendum campaign was under way, we see that the construction of complex noun phrases often entails rather forced premodification involving not only standard adjectives, but also, or mostly, adjectival nouns (a noun used to qualify another noun, as in university student), or adjective compounds (noun + an –ing or –en participle, as in life-changing). The compound job-destroying and variations upon it appeared repeatedly in attacks on EU regulation. Stevie Beer (2016) reports on Michael Gove, a trained journalist who knows how to manipulate language to good effect, using three adjective compounds in describing the EU as a ‘job-destroying, misery-inducing, unemployment-creating tragedy’. That the first and third compounds are actually synonymous is likely to go unnoticed by most readers or listeners, while the gross exaggeration of the second is less susceptible to challenge than the verb phrase The EU induces misery.

  Allister Heath (2016) also uses job-destroying as one of four premodifiers of a powerful noun to describe the EU as ‘an ultimately doomed, job-destroying, declining and mismanaged behemoth which stands no chance in an increasingly agile, globalised world’. All four wholly negative adjectival expressions could be contested, most of all the claim that the EU is declining given that it has grown from the six states of the original European Economic Community (EEC) in 1957 to the current twenty-eight, with no fewer than twelve new members joining since 2004. But declining is used as an adjective, along with three others, in an entity (a noun phrase with behemoth as its head), and our attention is immediately drawn to a comparison with a second entity: ‘an increasingly agile, globalised world’. The avoidance of verb processes means that the focus is on that comparison between phenomena that are not asserted but assumed to exist, and the presuppositions in the two noun phrases therefore receive less scrutiny. The essence of that comparison is considered in more detail in Chapter 11, that is, the question of whether Leavers are Little Englanders or genuine internationalists reaching out to a world beyond the confines of the old continent.

  Matthew Elliott, the Vote Leave chief executive quoted in the previous chapter (Gayle 2016), used a variation upon job-destroying in saying that ‘whilst the EU might be good for big multinationals, for smaller businesses it acts as a job destruction regulatory machine’. An adjective followed by three adjective compounds were used in the Sunday Telegraph’s unsigned editorial We must vote Leave to create a Britain fit for the future (2016), which concludes that the original decision to join the EEC in 1973 ‘led us into a cul-de-sac, hemmed in by a sclerotic, hide-bound, rules-obsessed, inward-looking institution’. Arguing the Lexit case, Nigel Willmott (2016) also used the adjective sclerotic in correctly predicting that ‘on Thursday a majority of working-class people will vote to leave what has become a sclerotic, over-centralised and undemocratic set of institutions, imposing economic austerity and unemployment to pay down the debts of an unregulated and greedy financial system’. Like Allister Heath, Willmott uses two lengthy noun phrases in quick succession (‘sclerotic, over-centralised and undemocratic set of institutions’ and ‘unregulated and greedy financial system’), which directs the reader’s attention to the link between the two rather than the presuppositions made in each.

  The comments quoted above are attributed to an MEP, an economist, a government minister, a political activist and at least three journalists/writers (we do not know how many pens contributed to an unsigned editorial). What is striking is the recurrence of certain lexical items (job-destroying, sclerotic) and, most of all, the repeated use of nominalization featuring strings of premodifiers qualifying the head noun. That those premodifiers often consist of -ing or -en participles linked to a noun is significant: it is indicative of the systematic avoidance of finite verbs with identifiable subjects. Verb phrases (which must contain at least one finite verb) would oblige greater clarity over who creates the misery or creates the unemployment than Michael Gove offers in his scathing attack on the EU.

  Nominalization and presupposition are very effective techniques in deflecting criticism. To find out whether certain views have become naturalized as widely accepted ‘facts’, we need to look at the language of those who ostensibly have a contrasting view. To an extent we have already done this in Chaper 1 on coordination and the fact that so many Remain supporters conceded that the Leavers had some valid arguments but, on balance, staying in the EU was the lesser evil. Attempts to campaign more vigorously led to Project Fear, which, as we see in Chapter 9, was badly handled and ultimately counterproductive. The party that was most enthusiastic in its support for the EU was the small Green Party whose leader, Caroline Lucas, promised to be ‘loud and proud’ about backing continued membership and, eschewing fear tactics or a half-hearted preference for the status quo, focused on the positive, on what the EU has actually delivered (Mason 2016):

  In a fast-changing world we need international rules to control big business and finance, and to ensure that people’s rights are protected – at work and as consumers. The EU has also given us the freedom to live, study, work and retire across an entire continent.

  The Green Party is very small, however, and to achieve greater visibility Caroline Lucas elected to team up with the Greek economist and Wolfgang Schäuble antagonist Yanis Varoufakis, the Labour shadow chancellor John McDonnell and other left-wing figures who distanced themselves from Stronger In and formed the Another Europe is Possible campaign group to present the radical case for maintaining EU membership. To promote this new movement Varoufakis himself (2016) wrote an article for the Guardian that conceded many of the arguments put forward by Brexit, and most of all Lexit, campaigners. That the European Union has a democratic deficit is acknowledged in his assertion that in the newly formed group ‘we stand united in our belief that a democratic, prosperous Britain can only be won in the context of a pan-European struggle to democratise the EU’. He refers to ‘the regulatory over-reach of Brussels’ and the need to ‘keep a check on bureaucrats luxuriating in the power of unelected office’. On the sovereignty issue he sounds almost like a Brexiteer in stating: ‘We reject the notion that Brit
ain must settle for diminished sovereignty as the price of global influence in the era of globalisation.’ Although he believes that migration has brought ‘undisputed net benefits’, he concedes that they have been ‘asymmetrically scattered’ and that the strain on public services in some areas has left ‘many with a feeling of having been marginalised in their own country’. He concludes with the choice facing the left:

  Progressives must make a judgment call: do they believe that something good may come out of the collapse of our reactionary, undemocratic EU? Or will its collapse plunge the continent into an economic and policial vortex that no Brexit can shield Britain from?

  Unlike the passionless, best-leave-things-as-they-are Remain arguments examined in Chapter 1, Varoufakis, McDonnell and Lucas advocate an energetic, proactive approach because the stark choice is either to radically reform the EU or watch it collapse.

  Nigel Willmott (2016) sees precisely the same defects in the EU that Varoufakis notes; the essential difference between them is that the former believes, to use his own words, that ‘remain and reform is wishful thinking’ while the later maintains that another Europe is possible. That the EU has become an unsavoury institution is not in dispute. Of course, Varoufakis is an academic whose position on the Brexit issue is the result of studying the facts and subjecting them to analysis, but when he gives an admirably (or self-defeatingly) honest assessment of the situation even while hoping to persuade people to vote Remain, he also reinforces the public’s negative perceptions.