Syntactic Analyses of Pakistani and British Newspaper: Syntax in Action

Abstract

Sentence structure and patterns are of great significance as they play a significant role in effective communication which is the essence of news articles. Limited research has been done on syntactic analysis of sentence structure and patterns employed in newspaper articles. This study conducted a comparative syntactic analysis of news articles from British and Pakistani newspapers. A mixed method approach was followed; the data was collected from five news articles each from the newspapers, The Guardian and The Nation that were published in April 2025 and was analyzed qualitatively by syntactic analysis. The findings with the help of quantitative method were then presented in the form of percentages to show how frequently certain sentence structure and pattern had been used in the newspaper articles. The research concluded that the most common sentence structures used in both newspapers’ articles were S+V, S+LV+SC, S+V+O+A, and S+V+O among others. Among the four sentence structures, S+V+O+A (41%)  was frequently used in The Nation while S+LV+SC (49%) was used the most in The Guardian. Moreover, the most frequently occurring sentence pattern was the simple sentence (32.8%) in The Nation whereas complex sentence (38.5%) was the most used in The Guardian. The research contributes to the understanding of the usage of sentence structures and patterns in newspapers and can enhance comprehension, human communication, and journalism practices.