A CORPUS BASED STUDY OF ENGLISH VOCABULARY IN DAWN NEWSPAPER SOCIAL EDITORIALS (2023-2025)

Abstract

The present study aims mainly at investigating the vocabulary used in the social editorials of the Dawn newspaper from 2023 to 2025. For this purpose, editorials representing social issues published in Dawn newspaper between 2023 and 2025 were taken as the sample of research. A corpus-based quantitative research design supported by limited qualitative interpretation was adopted. Selected social editorials were compiled into a corpus of 92,114 tokens and analyzed using AntConc and AntWordProfiler. The corpus analysis tool AntConc is used to find the most frequent lexical words and to analyze the collocational patterns of the seven most frequent lexical words using the Collocate Tool with Log-Likelihood statistics. The vocabulary profile of the corpus is analyzed using AntWordProfiler to examine lexical complexity by comparing it with the General Service List (GSL) and the Academic Word List (AWL). The findings show that women, children, health, people, government, and state are among the most common lexical words in the corpus. The collocation analysis also shows that these words are used in meaningful patterns in relation to social concerns. The results show that the editorials are characterized by a moderately complex vocabulary with a considerable proportion of high-frequency words and academic and specialized lexical items. The study contributes to corpus based research on media discourse by giving insights into the vocabulary patterns of Dawn newspaper editorials and enhancing the understanding of the linguistic representation of social issues in Dawn newspaper.