Mapping Meaning through Corpora: A Lexico-Semantic Exploration of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness

Abstract

This study applies corpus-assisted lexico-semantic analysis to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness to map patterns of lexical choice, semantic prosody, and thematic foregrounding across the novella. A single-text corpus of the work was extracted from project Guttenberg, and was compiled and processed with Voyant to extract keyword lists, collocations, node-word networks, semantic-tag frequencies, and distributional-semantics visualizations. Quantitative measures (keyness, mutual information, dispersion, and log-likelihood) were triangulated with qualitative close reading to interpret how recurrent lexis constructs representations of space, race, morality, and interiority. Results show a cohesive lexico-semantic field clustering around darkness, movement (river/journey), and degradation; these clusters demonstrate negative semantic prosodies and systematic metaphorical mappings that align lexical cohorts with colonial ideology and psychological collapse. Notably, lexical co-occurrence networks reveal that ostensibly isolated images (e.g., fog, abyss, whisper) function as distributed signals that reinforce thematic coherence across narrative layers and narrator voices. The analysis also detects subtle editorial shifts in lexical distribution, suggesting editorial influence on thematic emphasis and reader positioning. Methodologically, the paper demonstrates an integrative protocol for single-text corpus construction, multi-level annotation (lemma, POS, semantic tag), and transparent reporting of statistical thresholds to balance reliability with interpretive sensitivity. This corpus-led reading refines traditional critical accounts by providing reproducible evidence for semantic relations, and by demonstrating how lexico-semantic patterning contributes to affective and ideological effects. Implications extend to stylistics, postcolonial criticism, translation studies, and digital humanities: lexico-semantic mapping can reveal latent ideological structures, facilitate interdisciplinary dialogues, and inform future comparative and reception-based research on Conrad and colonial modernism. The study makes two contributions: empirically, it maps recurrent semantic expressions that strengthen Conrad’s rhetorical power to enable verification and extension by other researchers and pedagogy broadly.

Keywords: Heart of Darkness; Lexico-semantic patterns; Thematic foregrounding; Voyant tools