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

Abstract

This paper is a corpus enquiry aimed at profiling the most frequent verb-noun collocations in Ghanaian newspaper editorials published in the 2016/2017 news years. The study adopted a corpus -based analysis approach using the AntConc 3.4.4w corpus software. The sampling methods were both random and purposive. A total of 92,927 running words corpus comprising 92,927 tokens and 8,192 types were compiled from 220 editorials culled from Ghanaian Times and The Daily Graphic. The study revealed a total of sixty-seven (67) pre-established verb-noun collocations with two hundred and thirty-eight (238) instances of occurrence at sentential level from the concordance. The study showed that a collocate can occur at both the left and right side of a verb. Again, it found that though some verb-noun collocations deviated from the grammatical order of words in paradigm, natural collocations occurred more frequently. Also, it was established that both the predictive and open verb-noun collocations were predominantly used by editorial writers. Finally, both the predictive and open verb-noun collocations in the corpus formed patterns that confirmed the preexisting assumptions on collocation.