A corpus study of verbs in opinion articles of The Jakarta Post and the relation with text characteristics

Abstract

As one of the text categories, opinion texts have distinctive characteristics compared to any other texts in newspapers, including the choice of verb usage. This study then aims at preliminarily examining the verbs used in opinion articles in The Jakarta Post to find out the relation between frequency and text characteristics. This study collected the opinion articles of The Jakarta Post comprising 47.143 words. This study was assisted by Lancsbox to store the corpus of opinion section texts, to identify the verb lemmas, and to count the frequency of verbs. The verbs found in this study were then classified based on Scheibman’s main verb classification (which is based on Halliday’s and Dixon’s verb types). The results of the study show that there are three most frequent verb types used in opinion texts in The Jakarta Post; they are material, verbal, and feeling verb types. Meanwhile, the lesser frequent ones are perception, possessive/relational, relational, and cognition verbs types. Meanwhile, the least frequent verb types are existential, corporeal and perception/relational verbs types. As opinion text conveys the argument of the writer, it is plausible to find feeling verb type belongs to the third most frequent types, along with material type to show concrete actions and verbal type to report the information. These frequencies exhibit that there is a firm relationship between text characteristics and the tendency of verb choice.

2 | 1 | 2022

“…In total, the corpus consists of 68 articles with 62,319 word tokens (The Guardian -24 articles, 20,929 words; TSN -23 articles, 20,647 words; RT -21 articles, 20,743 words). Similar to most recent corpus studies investigating war and conflict media representation (Bicer, Brink, Camacho 2022;Oktavianti, Adnan 2020;Sahlane 2022), the current study is confined to op-eds due to their communicative purpose and their sub-register which tends to explicitly articulate the author's opinion and attitude toward the issue in question. The op-ed section of periodicals represents the opinion genre and includes letters to the editor, leader articles/editorials, and commentaries (Bednarek, Caple 2012).…”

Syntactic Complexity of Online Opinion Articles Published in South East Asian Countries

“…It explores the use and function of cohesive devices that link the text to the context (exophora) and those that relate the text to the culture (homophora). Meanwhile, Oktavianti and Adnan (2020) have identified the verbs found in opinion articles published in The Jakarta Post and found that there are three most frequent verb types used; material, verbal, and feeling verb types.…”