Author(s)

Junjie Zhao ¹

Affiliation(s)

¹ Sichuan University, Chengdu, 610200, Sichuan, China

Corresponding Author

Junjie Zhao

ABSTRACT

This paper develops a corpus consisting of around 5 million words from the British imperial discourses at the end of the 19th century, which covers three main areas: official politics, royal correspondence and public intellectual debate. Using the GraphColl and KWIC facilities of the Lancsbox software, based on keyword collocation analysis and semantic prosody calculation, this study explores how the semantic development of the term "empire" has been shaped by the 19th-century British society as a whole. It is revealed that there were some distinctive features associated with different stages of the connotation of the British Empire depending on the changes of socio-historical background.

KEYWORDS

19th-century Britain; empire; corpus linguistics; discourse construction; semantic prosody

CITE THIS PAPER

Junjie Zhao. Reinterpreting the Concept of "Empire" in 19th-Century British Social Contexts Based on Corpus Evidence. Lecture Notes on Language and Literature (2026). Vol. 9, No.1, 109-115. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.23977/langl.2026.090116.

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