Language Used in vacancy Advertisements: A Descriptive Study

Abstract

This research is basically a study of language used in vacancy advertisementsfrom the point of view of their peripheral and structural features. The main objectives ofthe study are to explore the physical features of vacancyadvertisements like varioususesof headlines, content, frequency of vocabularies and style of writing and toanalyze thestructures used in them in terms of sentence type, tense, voice, aspect and sentencelength. The sample population consists of eighty copies of vacancy advertisementspublished in four newspapers namely‘The Kathmandu Post’,‘The Times of India’,‘TheNew York Times’and‘The Times’which are published from Nepal, India, UK and USArespectively. The thesisconsists of four chapters; the first chapter is the introductory part andsets the background of vacancy advertisements concerning with mass media. It alsocontains review of the related literature, objectives and significance of the study. The second chapter presents the methodology adopted for the study. As theresearch is based on the vacancy advertisements, samples for the study are collected fromdifferent newspapers and chosen purposively to include thevarietiesof them. Altogethereightysamples are selected includingtwentyitems from each of the newspapers. The third chapter deals with the presentation, analysis and interpretation of theselected data. The data have been presented andanalyzeddescriptively with the help oftables. Finally, in the fourthchapter, findings of the study are summarized with somerecommendations and pedagogical implications; the research is concluded with thefindings that under theperipheral features varied use of headlines is preferred. Majorwordclass vocabulariesare dominantly usedwithbullets, tables and logos to mark themdistinct from other kind of writing. Structural features on the other hand, have beenconcluded with the findings that complete sentence with simple sentences are foundhighly used and they are followed byelliptical sentences. Use of active voice and non-post tense with simple aspect is preferred in writing and the average sentence length issixteen words per sentences. On the whole the style of writing is informal because itcontains abbreviations, short forms and technical terms which are specific in vacancyadvertisementsonly.