A Corpus Based Study Language Fixity in Journalistic Discourse: A Corpus-Based Study of Pakistani Editorials and Blogs

Abstract

Lexical bundles are the fixed patterns of language that appear in texts more than expected which according to Biber and Conrad(1999) are “word forms that often co-occur in longer sequences” (p. 989). The length of these structures varies but the most common lexical bundles are three words strings followed by the four words strings. The aim of the current study is to explore 3-word lexical bundles in Newspaper editorials and news blogs written by Pakistani writers to verify the fixity of language, which means language relies on the prefabricated structures, in the journalistic discourse. For this purpose a corpus of 25641 words was compiled which consisted of 20 newspaper editorials and 20 news blogs. The corpus was explored in the light of Biber and Conrad’s (1999) structural taxonomy of lexical bundles. The analysis shows that the news editorials have higher use and variety of lexical bundles compared to news blogs which highlights the fluency and higher linguistic competence of the editorial writers. The dominant category of the lexical bundles was noun phrase fragments in the newspaper editorials.

Keywords

• fixed phrases
• language of editorials
• phrase fragments