KEYWORDS AND COLLOCATIONAL PATTERNS OF POWER, FREEDOM, AND AUTHORITY IN GEORGE ORWELL’S ESSAYS: A CORPUS LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS

Abstract

This study investigates the representation of authority, power, and freedom in six selected essays by George Orwell: Politics and the English Language, Why I Write, The Prevention of Literature, Notes on Nationalism, Looking Back on the Spanish War, and The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius. The objective of the study is to examine how Orwell employs language to construct ideological positions, criticise political systems, and represent social power relations. The research adopts a corpus-assisted discourse analytical framework by combining Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies (CADS) and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). A corpus of the selected essays was compiled and analysed using AntConc software. The analysis was conducted in multiple phases, including word frequency, collocation, and concordance analyses, as well as qualitative interpretation of ideological patterns. The frequency analysis identified dominant lexical items associated with political authority, nationalism, democracy, war, and social class. The collocation analysis examined the relationships between keywords such as power, freedom, and authority and their recurring lexical environments, while the concordance analysis explored their contextual meanings within Orwell’s discourse. The findings reveal that Orwell consistently portrays power and authority as mechanisms of political control, domination, and ideological influence. In contrast, freedom is represented as a democratic ideal associated with free speech, intellectual independence, truth, and equality. The qualitative interpretation further demonstrates Orwell’s strong opposition to authoritarianism, propaganda, nationalism, and social inequality, as well as his advocacy of democratic values, critical thinking, and individual liberty. The study concludes that Orwell’s essays construct a sustained ideological critique of oppressive power structures while promoting democratic participation and social justice. Future research may extend this investigation to Orwell’s novels and journalistic writings or conduct comparative corpus-based studies of political discourse across different authors and historical contexts.