Use of Passive Voice in Newspaper Articles

29 Apr 2022, 13:50
20m
Presenters (Oral Presentation) – Live ZOOM Presentation All topics Student Session

Speaker

Renars Revelins

Description

Research on newspapers and the passive voice has been conducted; however, not extensively. The goal of this paper is to analyse the use of the passive voice in newspaper articles published by major online British newspapers – Daily Mail, The Sun, Evening Standard, and Metro. In order to investigate the passive voice in the selected articles, a literature review, content analysis and frequency count have been conducted. The results of the research demonstrate that the passive voice is applied most frequently in The Sun and Daily Mail; eight passive voice tenses have been found in total, with the past simple and the present simple tenses being the most frequent. The passive voice was typically used when the author placed attention on the action, and in instances, when the doer was obvious. The analysis allowed to make conclusions regarding the use of the passive voice in newspaper articles and has the potential to explore this topic in the future.

Key words: passive voice, ‘News’, ‘Sports’, ‘Culture’, Daily Mail, The Sun, Evening Standard, Metro

Biographical note(s) of the author(s)

My previous research interests have entailed the use of passive voice in various discourses. I am currently an MA student in the course English Studies. Last year I graduated from the BA course English Philology.

Affiliation of the author(s)

Student at University of Latvia, faculty of humanities

Contact e-mail address revelins.renars@gmail.com
Recommendation (for student section) Jekaterina Čerņevska, jekaterina.cernevska@lu.lv

Primary author

Renars Revelins

Presentation materials

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