Language Used in Political News

Abstract

The present study has made an attempt to find out the kind of language used in political news stories in terms of sentence types, tense, aspect, voice and vocabularies with their word-class and frequency. Non -probability judgmental sampling design had been applied to collect the data in the study. The data was taken from the three English national dailies published in Nepal. In this study, complex sentence, past tense, simple aspect and active voice were found to be maximally used in the political news stories of all three newspapers published from Nepal. The progressive aspect in TKP has not been found. Perfect-Progressive sentences have, also, been used less frequently in comparison to other aspects in all newspapers. The special vocabularies found in the newspapers under study were ninety one in total. All abbreviated and peculiar words were found to be used in the politics and among the major-word-class, nouns have been used maximally and adverbs have not been found at all. This thesis comprises of four chapters. The first chapter deals with general background of the study, varieties of linguistic code, mass media and their impact in society, news, newspapers, introduction to politics, review of related literature, objectives, significance of the study and definition of terms used in the study. In the second chapter, it includes the methodology applied in the study. It comprises sources of data, sampling procedure, tools of data collection, process of data collection and some important limitations of the study. Similarly, the third chapter displays analysis and interpretation of the collected data for the study using simple statistical tools like average and percentage. The comparison has been made, mainly, between the three Nepali-English newspapers viz. THT, TKP and TRN in terms of frequency. Lastly, the fourth chapter of this thesis presents the findings and some recommendations based on the analysis and interpretation of the available data. At the end, the references and appendices along with some samples of political news have been included.