Corpus driven analysis of news reports about Covid-19 in a Malaysian online newspaper
Covid-19 was declared a global pandemic by the World Health Organization on 11th March, 2020. Scientists and researchers immediately took interests to find a vaccine. While researchers in various discipline, particularly in medicine, began to study about the virus to help us understand the situat...
| Main Authors: | , |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Penerbit Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia
2020
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| Online Access: | http://journalarticle.ukm.my/15729/ http://journalarticle.ukm.my/15729/1/40392-135058-4-PB.pdf |
| Summary: | Covid-19 was declared a global pandemic by the World Health Organization on 11th March,
2020. Scientists and researchers immediately took interests to find a vaccine. While researchers
in various discipline, particularly in medicine, began to study about the virus to help us
understand the situation from various perspectives, there is limited research on linguistics
analysis to date about Covid-19. Therefore, the present study aims to contribute to research in
linguistics about Covid-19, by employing corpus-driven approach for data analysis. Online
newspaper reports about Covid-19 were downloaded from the Star online from March 1st to
March 31st, 2020. A total of 1018 news reports were processed and analysed, with 140 themes
being identified.100 top collocates with the MI score set at a minimum of 5, using AntConc
software revealed that verb and noun collocates co-occurred frequently with the node word
Covid-19. Generally, the collocates reflect fear, anxiety and uncertainty that majority of
Malaysians feel. have. It also shows how the virus is taking a toll on Malaysia and Malaysians
with regards to economy and social life. On the other hand, some of the collocates portrayed
the government to be in total control of the situation, despite the threat to health and economic
situations in the country. Suggestions for future research about Covid-19 include comparison
of several newspaper reports from English newspapers in Malaysia, analysis of news report
during extended movement control order (ECMO) in Malaysia or discourse analysis of crisis
communication by political leaders in ASEAN. |
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