A Closer Look At Multi Word Verbs In Pakistani English E-Newspapers: A Wordsmith Concord Tool Approach

Abstract

The study focuses on the particle or "multi-word" verbs (PVs) in online Pakistani English Newspapers’ feature articles corpus (NFAC) and news articles corpus (NAC). The study is confined to the period between January 1st and March 31st, 2022. To conduct a detailed analysis, the WordSmith Concord Tool was employed, utilizing a specific set of parameters: particles were defined as context words, and the context search horizons were set to 0L (zero left) and 5R (five words to the right of the search phrase).

The present research starts with the assumption that in terms of frequency of use and structural behavior, particle verbs could acquire genre-specific characteristics. There were methodical variances among the focused sections of the newspapers. Daily Times NFAC, particularly, was discovered to have the highest particle verbs’ frequency, as well as the broadest range in terms of structural applications, formal and semantic innovations. In various genres for particle verbs, it was discovered that specific forms and connotations are predominant, even though the dataset’s small size and the resultant lower frequency of individual particle verbs make generalization relatively hard.