A corpus analysis of verbs indicating growth trends in news about the COVID-19 pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic has profoundly impacted societies, economies, and healthcare systems worldwide. In this time of unprecedented crisis, the media undertook a pivotal role in informing and shaping the responses of the public to the pandemic. Employing a corpus of 120 news articles from the United Kingdom and the United States, this thesis aims to examine the linguistic patterns in the reporting of the coronavirus, using the software AntConc. Quantitative and qualitative corpus-linguistic methodologies have been applied to analyse frequencies, collocations and the semantic nuances that emerge in the context of news reports on COVID-19. Specific focus has been given to verbs indicating upward trends, namely "increase," "rise," and "surge”, due to their prevalence in news reports and their significance in teaching near-synonyms to EFL students. This analysis aims to contribute to our understanding of linguistic choices in health crisis reporting and to enhance the field of corpus linguistics by detailing the behaviour of near-synonyms during the crisis.