Collocational Patterns of Power Verbs in Parliamentary Discourse: A Corpus-Based Analysis of UK and Australian Debates

Abstract

This study investigates the collocational behavior of power verbs in parliamentary discourse, focusing on how linguistic choices construct relations of authority, agency, and governance in political speech. Power verbs—such as mandate, impose, compel, direct, authorize, restrict, sanction, and regulate—are central to the linguistic encoding of institutional power and policy enactment. The analysis is based on a 50-million-word corpus of parliamentary debate transcripts drawn from UK Hansard and Australian parliamentary records spanning 2000 to 2024. A total of forty power verbs were identified and examined for their collocational profiles, with particular attention to subject–verb and verb–object relations. Using Sketch Engine, collocates were extracted and statistically evaluated through mutual information (MI) scores and t-score measures to determine both strength and reliability of associations. The findings demonstrate consistent patterns in which institutional actors, particularly government bodies, ministries, and legislative authorities, frequently occupy subject positions, thereby encoding them as primary agents of action. In contrast, citizens, regulated entities, and social groups are predominantly positioned as grammatical objects, reflecting their construction as recipients of institutional decisions rather than active participants. Diachronic analysis reveals a notable shift in collocational patterns between the two sub-periods examined: 2000–2014 and 2015–2024. The latter period shows increased association of power verbs with cooperative and mitigated governance contexts, suggesting a discursive move toward softer forms of authority characterized by partnership, consultation, and co-production. These findings indicate that while parliamentary language continues to encode institutional asymmetries of power, it is simultaneously adapting to evolving democratic norms that emphasize participatory governance. The study contributes to corpus-based critical discourse analysis and advances understanding of how grammatical and collocational choices reflect broader ideological shifts in political communication.