CORPUS ANALYSIS OF COLLOCATIONS WITH HEALTH IN THE MEDIA TEXTS

Abstract

The media is an influential tool in shaping public’s opinion about HEALTH and its basic components. As this topic has been of great importance lately, the corpus study of media texts with HEALTH can reveal verbal means of how this lemma is depicted by journalists as well as what urgent social concerns are connected with HEALTH and what issues reader are aware of. The research is aimed at studying collocations with HEALTH in The Guardian and The Mirror newspapers, focusing on the comparative analysis of them presented in the broadsheet and tabloid. Sketch Engine has been used to investigate the lemma HEALTH in both newspapers, which helps to disclose the linguistic means used to outline the concept HEALTH. The findings of the study prove that despite the use of modifiers and verbs with HEALTH common for both newspapers (e.g., mental, physical, public; improve, protect, affect), the Mirror presents a wider choice of collocations with HEALTH compared to The Guardian, whereas the lexeme HEALTH is more frequently used in the latter ‒ 2,367.84 per million as to 1,615.61 per million in the first one. Furthermore, the tabloid presents a larger range of health subjects while the broadsheet displays a narrower area of the topic with a more conservative point of view.