Verb-Noun Collocations In Newspaper Editorials In Ghana: A Corpus-Based Analysis

Abstract

This paper is a corpus-based study which aims at profiling the most frequent verb-noun collocations and their communicative functions in newspaper editorials in Ghana. In all, a total of 92,927 running words were culled from 220 newspaper editorials from The Ghanaian Times and The Daily Graphic, which were published in the 2016 and 2017 news years, for compilation of a specialised corpus for the study. From the collocation tab of the AntConc corpus software, sixty-seven Verb-Noun Collocations were found to constitute the most frequently occurring collocations in the newspaper editorials under study. The corpus revealed that both predictive and open Verb-Noun Collocations which alternate at the left and right sides on the collocation window span are mostly used by newspaper editorial writers in Ghana. Again, it was observed that phrasal patterns of a noun collocate differed according to its position on either the left or right side of a verb node. The semantic prosodies of the profiled verb-noun collocations revealed five major discourses which constituted the most discussed issues in the newspaper editorials published in 2016 and 2017 news years.These issues were governance, politics and elections, peace and security, law and order, and corruption.