This study is corpus based; it is aimed at identifying and analyzing the function of preposition in some selected newspaper editorials. The newspapers used for this analysis are The Guardian, This Day, Daily Trust, Leadership and National Mirror published between 1st and 31st May, 2016. Five articles were selected from each newspaper. The methodology used for this analysis is based on the content model theory of Halliday and Hassan (1989) and the approach based on the insights of Crystal and Davy (1969). The selected prepositions were classified and analyzed according to their grammatical functions, indicating possession or close connection between entities, the purpose for which an action takes place, relating events or state of affairs to a location and by indicating circumstances of actions. The prepositions used in the analysis include the genitive “of” vis-à-vis means, place, purpose, time and source. Others also function as adjuncts indicating circumstances of action, events or situations. The study revealed that editorial writers used preposition in writing their editorials. The study recommends among others the need for columnist to use both simple and complex prepositions to achieve clarity and precision in their editorials.
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. Prepositions are words that are used to connect nouns, pronouns, and phrases to other words in a sentence and a prepositional phrase is a set of words comprising a preposition, objects, and object modifiers. This research aimed to study the use of prepositional phrases in the newspaper to observe the semantic and syntactic effect of prepositions on sentences. This corpus-based study used mixed methods as both quantitative and qualitative approach was used by the researcher. The data was collected from opinion sections of Dawn newspapers from 2016-2021 published in Pakistan. Tag Ant is used for tagging the data so that parts of speech can be identified and then used ANTCONC to find concordance and interpret this data. The results showed that the prepositions occurred before nouns, verbs, articles, and adjectives meaning these were part of the prepositional phrase, and most of the time occurred before nouns. It was concluded that “the” preposition states the state and condition of one thing that may be a noun or verb towards another and tells how these were related and made a sentence complete both semantically and syntactically. The researcher analysed the data and concluded accordingly with the representation of graphs for better understanding.
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ABSTRACT This work carried out a lexico-syntactic analysis of newspaper editorials. The study, specifically, identified the lexico-syntactic features used by the editors in the selected editorials; examined how language was used by the editors in treating the themes of their editorial discourses; and analysed the sentence types in their editorials coupled with their communicative effects on the intended audience. The data for the study were ten (10) editorials from five (5) online newspapers. The data were analysed using Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar. Findings from the analysis of the editorials revealed that the editors projected themes on the strengths and weaknesses of the governorship election. The study, therefore, concluded that the editors used simple language to aid readers’ comprehension of the editorials.
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International Journal of English Linguistics
English language in Nigeria has the status as an official language that is used in local and international correspondences. One aspect of English grammar that is very hard for second language users including Nigerians to master is prepositions. Not only that English prepositions difficult, they are also the most frequently used items in newspapers that play an important role to signal political and cultural discourses. This study aims to describe the usage and communicative functions of spatial prepositions “in, on and at” in the headlines of four major Nigerian newspapers. Primarily, to achieve that the present study adopted Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics. Data were collected through the analyses of 21 headlines from four selected major Nigerian newspapers. The findings revealed that Vanguard, a major Nigerian newspaper, has the highest percentage of the usage of target prepositions (26.86%), seconded by Punch (24.92%), followed by the Sun (24.27%), an.
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English Language Teaching
Studies on prepositions have been explored in corpus linguistics. They have been studied in various perspectives mainly in relation to frequency and collocational information. In order to look at the developments of these studies, this paper will focus on the development of sequence of studies of prepositions in three decades as observed by the authors. In keeping up with the developments, this paper will also look into the scenario of English language corpus work in Malaysia. Based on these review, this paper will then further add to this body of knowledge by providing a more tangible and practical applications in dealing with prepositions from the perspectives of the teaching and learning of prepositions.
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International Journal of Linguistics
