A study of lexical chunks in news reports of the times online in 2014

Abstract

This thesis investigated the use of multi-word expressions referred to as chunks in The Times electronic newspaper. With the high demand in learning foreign languages nowadays, achieving proficiency of English seems to be the goal that everyone wants to try to accomplish. The aim of this study was to analyze their syntactic features and the frequency of each type of chunks. The study was designed in qualitative and quantitative approaches, together with the methods such as descriptive, analytic methods. The data of the study was collected in 100 news reports of The Times online published in 2014. The researcher has carried out step by step to find out the way of lexical chunks used in articles. Firstly, the data was collected and classified from 100 reports with several topics. Secondly, the researcher analyzed the data based on the suggested framework. Comparing the data collected with the theories suggested, the researcher came up with the results to fulfill the proposed questions. There were a number of lexical chunks which belong to five main types of form-based chunks employed in the articles. Among these, the most commonly used lexical chunks were collocations which play an important roles in vocabulary. The study of the chunks used in newspaper hopes to provide additional evidence for their necessity as building blocks of discourse associated with basic communicative functions.