A Corpus Based Study of Prepositional Phrases in Dawn Newspaper Editorials
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.21015/vtess.v10i4.1291Abstract
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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