Abdul Razak, Zainur Rijal (2011). Modern media Arabic: a study of word frequency in world affairs and sports sections in Arabic newspapers. University of Birmingham. Ph.D.
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Abstract
This study examines language style of Arabic newspapers particularly in the world affairs and sport sections, using the word frequency analysis. The study is divided into seven chapters. The first chapter mainly focuses on background and aims of the study, while review of previous studies is presented in the second chapter. Chapter Three discusses Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), the selected newspapers and the chosen sections. Chapter Four concerns on the methodology applied in the study. Analysis of the language style is presented in Chapter five and followed by findings which are discussed in Chapter Six. The final chapter provides summary, conclusion and suggestions for further research.
The study employed a self-constructed method in corpus building. A total of 30 articles (world affairs and sports) from seven Arabic newspapers were collected from the official online websites mostly in November 2007. Five of the newspapers are published in Arab countries and one in both the United Kingdom and Australia. The Wordsmith version 5.0 was used in analyzing the corpus data. Both descriptive and inferential statistics were employed to analyse word frequency list in both categories, while the Likelihood ratio test was applied in the comparison analysis.
Findings revealed that most high frequency words have close relationship to their respective categories especially in the use of nouns. Slight differences were identified in terms of word spelling, loan word, verb transitivity and phrase amongst the newspapers published in different countries s. It is also proven that there is a tendency in MSA to practice new features in news writing which is different from the well known Arabic grammar, i.e, verb and subject agreement in gender. Different newspapers have also demonstrated their own focus in news reporting, and sports section is found to use more specific words than world affairs section.
| Type of Work: | Thesis (Doctorates > Ph.D.) | ||||||
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| Award Type: | Doctorates > Ph.D. | ||||||
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| College/Faculty: | Colleges (2008 onwards) > College of Arts & Law | ||||||
| School or Department: | School of Philosophy, Theology and Religion, Department of Theology and Religion | ||||||
| Funders: | None/not applicable | ||||||
| Subjects: | B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > BL Religion P Language and Literature > P Philology. Linguistics P Language and Literature > PJ Semitic |
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| URI: | http://etheses.bham.ac.uk/id/eprint/2882 |
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