







































English Language Teaching Educational Journal   ISSN 2621-6485 

Vol. 3, No. 2, 2020, pp. 108-117  108 

                                                   http://journal2.uad.ac.id/index.php/eltej/index        eltej@pbi.uad.ac.id 

A corpus study of verbs in opinion articles of The Jakarta Post 

and the relation with text characteristics 

Ikmi Nur Oktaviantia,1,*, Asmad Adnanb,2 

a,b Universitas Ahmad Dahlan, Tamanan, Bantul, Daerah Istimewa Yogyakarta, Indonesia 
1 ikmi.oktavianti@pbi.uad.ac.id*; 2 asmad_adnan@yahoo.com    

* corresponding author 

 

1. Introduction  

In English syntactic construction, verbs are salient since there will be no grammatical 
construction without verbs. This corresponds to the need of tense inflection in English clauses and to 
be able to have tense inflection, there must be verbs in the clause (Baker, 2004). In addition, verbs 
play a vital role to s-select the constituent allowed in the clause constructions. As argued by van 
Gelderen (2017), verbs are salient because they determine the internal and external arguments of the 
clauses. With regard to its capability, verbs are more dynamic compared to the other lexical 
categories, i.e. nouns, adjectives, adverbs (Clackson, 2007).  

In regard to the use of language, some aspects, such as the context of usage and text 
characteristics, affect the use of verbs. This means that different communication modes might result 
in different choices of verbs. For instance, with regard to verb, according to Carter and McCarthy 
(2006), verb know is very frequent in spoken English, but it is not frequent in written English. Aside 
from verb use, the first-person pronoun I is found to be more frequent in spoken language than in 
written language. This proves that there are some differences in using language, depending on the 
mode as well as the other aspects, e.g. text genres and/or dialects (Biber & Conrad, 2009). As with 
the differences in spoken and written language, one of the plausible reason is the different 

A R T I C LE  IN F O  

 

ABST RACT  

 

 

Article history 

Received  May 04, 2020 

Revised  June 26, 2020 

Accepted  August 3, 2020 

 As one of the text categories, opinion texts have distinctive 
characteristics compared to any other texts in newspapers, including the 
choice of verb usage. This study then aims at preliminarily examining 
the verbs used in opinion articles in The Jakarta Post to find out the 
relation between frequency and text characteristics. This study collected 
the opinion articles of The Jakarta Post comprising 47.143 words. This 
study was assisted by Lancsbox to store the corpus of opinion section 
texts, to identify the verb lemmas, and to count the frequency of verbs. 
The verbs found in this study were then classified based on Scheibman’s 
main verb classification (which is based on Halliday’s and Dixon’s verb 
types). The results of the study show that there are three most frequent 
verb types used in opinion texts in The Jakarta Post; they are material, 
verbal, and feeling verb types. Meanwhile, the lesser frequent ones are 
perception, possessive/relational, relational, and cognition verbs types. 
Meanwhile, the least frequent verb types are existential, corporeal and 
perception/relational verbs types. As opinion text conveys the argument 
of the writer, it is plausible to find feeling verb type belongs to the third 
most frequent types, along with material type to show concrete actions 
and verbal type to report the information. These frequencies exhibit that 
there is a firm relationship between text characteristics and the tendency 
of verb choice. 

 

This is an open access article under the CC–BY-SA license. 

    

 

 
Keywords 

Verbs 

Opinion 

Corpus 

Frequency 

Text characteristics 

 

 

http://journal2.uad.ac.id/index.php/eltej/index
mailto:ikmi.oktavianti@pbi.uad.ac.id
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ISSN 2621-6485 English Language Teaching Educational Journal 109 
 Vol. 3, No. 2, 2020, pp. 108-117 

 Oktavianti and Adnan (A corpus study of verbs in opinion articles of The Jakarta Post...) 

characteristics of the medium; spoken language tends to be more spontaneous and involves two-way 
interactions than written language (Biber & Quirk, 2012).  

The representation of verb use in language can be seen in newspaper since the language used in 
newspaper is closer to everyday language (Bednarek & Caple, 2012; Biber & Conrad, 2009). 
Newspaper, therefore, has been very appealing for linguistic studies. Compared to literary works, the 
language use in them is rather manipulative, yet aesthetic for the purpose of building the imaginative 
world of the story (Leech & Short, 2007). As for academic text, the language used is the standard 
forms and use academic style (Biber & Conrad, 2009; Biber & Gray, 2016). Thus, compared to 
other canonical text genres, investigating verbs in news texts is obviously interesting as well as 
beneficial for the description of language use in general.  

To be able to describe the verbs comprehensively, this study employs a corpus-based analysis, 
which means this study focuses on the frequency of use and uses a larger scale of data for the 
analysis. Several corpus studies on verbs in newspapers have been conducted to seek for 
pedagogical implication (Deng & Li, 2017), and corpus studies to assist critical discourse analysis of 
the news texts (Moon, 2016; Wang, 2015), and to depict the morphosyntactic aspects of the verbs in 
news texts (Bednarek & Caple, 2012). Some other verbs were examined by focusing on report verbs 
used by native and non-native speakers of English (Yilmaz & Ertürk, 2017), and by investigating 
phrasal verbs (Zarifi & Mukundan, 2013).  

In relation to frequency of use, there has been proven that verbs in news texts are more likely in 
the form of present tense and the use of active voice is more frequent than passive voice for some 
reasons (Bednarek & Caple, 2012). In text analysis (e.g. news text analysis), Biber (2012) points out 
that each text has specific lexical choice that is included as the characteristic of the text. A particular 
lexical unit or linguistic unit is more likely to be used in a particular text. Using Longman Spoken 
and Written Corpus, (Biber, 2012) shows that passive verbs are more frequent in academic texts 
than in conversation, and some verbs (e.g. make, find) are more frequent in academic texts than in 
conversation. 

The study of frequency has been recognized in linguistics, such as in studying the relation of 
frequency and language typology (Bentz, Alikaniotis, Samardžić, & Buttery, 2017), the importance 
of lexical frequency for designing teaching materials (Criado & Sánchez, 2012), and the relation 
between frequency and language change (Feltgen, Fagard, & Nadal, 2017). In text analysis, 
frequency holds a salient role because each text might have its own lexical choice that results in 
different frequency of use (Biber, 2012). In this topic, Hardjanto (2016) has investigated the relation 
between text type and modal use. Although being in the same text type, Bonyadi (2011) figures out 
that there are different tendencies of modal use in news texts between two news media. Similarly, 
Hardjanto (2016) who investigates the use of modals in academic texts of five different fields (e.g. 
economics, linguistics, medicine, engineering, natural sciences) also describes that there are some 
slight differences in the choice of modals. Within the same mode of communication (i.e. written 
mode), there might also some notable differences in terms of linguistic unit usage such as done by 
Staples, Biber, and Reppen, (2018) who compare the linguistic aspects of TOEFL IBT task and 
disciplinary writing task.  

Those studies, however, mainly focus on news text as a single register. However, there are also 
sub-type of news texts to be analyzed, such as hard news, soft news or feature, and opinion or 
editorial (Bell, 1991). There have been some studies focusing on the frequency of verbs in the more 
specific news texts; they are the corpus study of verbs in hard news (Oktavianti & Ardianti, 2019) 
and the corpus study in feature or lifestyle articles (Oktavianti & Pramesti, 2019). Biber and Conrad, 
(2009) also distinguish verbs used in news (both hard and soft news) and editorials. The discussion, 
however, is still limited to verb type based on transitivity (e.g. intransitive, transitive, ditransitive 
verbs) and voice (active, passive verbs). Little is known about the choice of verb types and the 
relation with the characteristics of opinion texts. This study then aims at examining the frequency of 
verbs in opinion articles. To delimit the study, The Jakarta Post is selected because it is a well-
established and the oldest English newspaper in Indonesia. Besides, it enables free and easy access 
for the compilation of data so that the results of the study can be comprehensive and reliable. 

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110 English Language Teaching Educational Journal   ISSN 2621-6485 

 Vol. 3, No. 2, 2020, pp. 108-117 

 Oktavianti and Adnan (A corpus study of verbs in opinion articles of The Jakarta Post...) 

2. Literature Review 

This research uses a corpus method (i.e. corpus linguistics) to analyze the data. Corpus linguistics 
is the study of digitally stored language data (i.e. spoken and written texts) (McEnery & Hardie, 
2012). Corpus is a collection of digitally stored texts, i.e. spoken and written texts (McEnery & 
Hardie, 2012; Stefanowitsch, 2020). Given the large amount of data compiled in a corpus, the nature 
of corpus is related to the capability of providing rich quantitative data as language use is not parole, 
but it is collective use (Burkette & Kretzschmar Jr., 2018). In accordance to the benefits it offers, 
corpus has been extensively used in various linguistic studies. Thus, corpus linguistics is preferably 
seen as a methodology to approach language rather than a branch of linguistics (McEnery & Hardie, 
2012). With a large amount of data, studying language use with corpus assistance, thus, might 
enable comprehensive qualitative and quantitative analyses and obtain more reliable results. In 
linguistics, corpus studies have widely recognized for many branches (Baker, 2003; Biber, 2006; 
Ismail, Idrus, & Syed Sahuri, 2020; Kranich, 2010; Makamani & Mutasa, 2017; Moon, 2016; 
Motschenbacher, 2018; Staples et al., 2018; Wright & Brookes, 2019). Aside from linguistics, 
corpus can also be applied for language teaching field (Akıncı & Yıldız, 2017; Arellano, 2018; 
Astika, 2018; Kim, 2019; Kızıl & Savran, 2018; Lin, 2016; Phoocharoensil, 2017; Yanto & 
Nugraha, 2017).  

In regard to the main focus of a corpus study, this study examines the frequency of verbs in 
opinion articles. It is of importance to investigate frequency of linguistic units since frequency often 
tells about something. According to Baker (2010), frequency indicates something important. In other 
words, something that is frequent is salient to the users. In regard to language use, different texts, for 
example, might affect different choice of linguistic units. As studied by Biber and Quirk (2012) and 
Biber and Conrad (2009) on the use of modals, it is evident that core modals are less frequent in 
news texts than in fiction and academic texts. Emphasizing the results of those previous studies, 
Szudarski (2017) points out that studying frequency in a certain text (corpus) can assist the 
description of the text. In other words, it is noticeable that certain linguistic features or units tend to 
occur more frequently in a particular text.  

With regard to news texts, Bell (1991) classifies types of news texts into hard news (or news), 
soft news (features, lifestyle), and editorial (and sort of argumentative texts). Each of the sections 
represents different types of text genres as well different purpose and characteristics. News report is 
expected to describe events with less subjectivity (Biber & Conrad, 2009). On the contrary, 
editorials and opinion texts are to some extent slightly different. Editorials are written in the 
newsroom, so they express the opinion of the newspaper. Meanwhile, opinions texts are written by 
outsiders or readers of the newspapers. Bell (1991) further mentions that, apart from the different 
perspective of the opinions, editorials and opinion texts are relatively identical. Both are basically 
meant to serve the same purpose to express an opinion openly and convince the readers to believe 
the opinion (Biber & Conrad, 2009). In other words, editorials and opinion are within the same 
genre (Bednarek & Caple, 2012). Since this paper focuses more on the characteristics of the 
linguistic features, it is possible to overlook the insignificant difference of both types of 
argumentative texts.  

Biber and Conrad (2009) mention that what distinguishes news from opinion (or editorial) texts 
is factuality since opinion texts do not talk about factual events, but the opinion toward a particular 
event. News texts serve to report an event, while opinion texts aim at delivering an opinion (which 
tends to be more subjective) on an event or issue. Having distinct text characteristics and functions, 
therefore, opinion texts might have different linguistic features as well as different verb choices. 
This has been proven by Biber and Conrad (2009) showing that there are modals that are more 
frequently used in opinion texts compared to news report. For instance, modal should is more 
frequent in opinion texts since one of the purpose of opinion texts is to recommend what should 
happen in relation to the phenomenon being discussed.   

3. Research Method 

This study employs a corpus-based approach since it compiles a larger scale of data, uses a 
corpus tool, and conducts a corpus analysis (i.e. frequency analysis) (McEnery & Hardie, 2012). 
Corpus linguistics as one of the branches of linguistics is a methodology because it deals with how 
to collect and analyze linguistic data (McEnery & Hardie, 2012; Stefanowitsch, 2020). This study 

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ISSN 2621-6485 English Language Teaching Educational Journal 111 
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compiled linguistic data (the self-compiled corpus) from opinion articles in The Jakarta Post 
published from October—November 2018 with the size of 47.143 words. The corpus was then 
analyzed by identifying the verbs as well as calculating the frequencies of the verbs by using a 
corpus tool, Lancsbox (Brezina, Timperley, & McEnery, 2018). In Lancsbox, frequency of verbs 
was calculated in Whelk feature by sorting the type into lemma and filtering the result box by 
inserting *_v to sort out the results for only verbs. The corpus tool also calculates the frequency and 
displays the results based on the order from the highest to the smallest ones (or vice versa) that could 
assist the analysis. After having the frequency results, the verbs were classified by following 
(Scheibman, 2001) which consists of verb classifications based on Halliday (Halliday & 
Matthiessen, 2004) and Dixon (Dixon, 2005). This study used the classification compiled by 
Scheibman since it best fits the need of the analysis of text characteristics. Table 1 displays the 
classification.  

Table 1.  Classification of verbs by Scheibman (2001) 

Verb Type Description Examples 

Cognition cognitive activity know,think, remember, figure out 

Corporeal bodily gestures, bodily 
interaction 

eat, drink, sleep, live, smoke 

Existential exist, happen be, havve, sit, stay, happen 
Feeling emotion, wanting like, want, feel, need, bother, enjoy 

Material concrete and abstract 
doings and happenings 

do, go, take, teach, work, use, play, come 

Perception perception, attention look, see, hear, find, notice 
Perception/ 

  Relational 

perception (subject not 

senser) 

look, smell, sound 

Possessive/ 
  Relational 

possession (x has a) have, get 

Relational  processes of being  

(x is a, x is AT a) 

be, get, be like (descriptive), become 

Verbal saying, symbolic 
exchange of meaning 

say, talk, mean, tell, ask, go (quotative),  
be like (quotative) 

 

There are, however, some ambiguities for some words, e.g. get that can be classified into either 
relational or possessive/relational. To overcome this problem, this study uses Lancsbox 
concordance feature, KWIC (Keyword in Context), to distinguish which get belongs to which type of 
verbs. This study analyzes the frequency of verbs used in opinion articles by referring to the raw 
frequency (including token frequency) and the percentage. To comprehensively discuss the relation 
between frequency and characteristics of text, this study implements thick description (Stake, 2010) 
to interpret the plausible connection.  

4. Findings and Discussion 

This section discusses two key analyses of this study, namely the frequency of verb types and the 
relation between frequency and characteristics of the text. To begin with, the following is the 
discussion on the frequency of verb type investigated in the self-compiled corpus.  

4.1. Frequency of Verb Types in Opinion Articles 

Based on the Scheibman’s compilation of verb types, Table 2 presents the overall frequency of 
verbs in opinion articles in The Jakarta Post. Based on Table 2, it is found that material verb is the 
most frequent verb type in the corpus of opinion of The Jakarta Post. This verb type dominates the 
whole corpus by occupying 28,4 % of all verbs found in the corpus. The other most frequent verb 
types are verbal (18,2 %) and feeling verb types (14,4 %). As for the less frequent verb types, there 
are possessive/relational (9,9%), relational (8,2%), perception (7,3%), cognition verbs (7,1%). 
Meanwhile, the other three types of verbs, existential (2,1%), corporeal (2,8%) and 
perception/relational (0,8%) belong to the least frequent verb types in which the frequencies of 
those types are below 5% in the corpus. For the detailed description of verb type frequencies, it is 
listed in Table 3.  

file:///D:/2020/ELTEJ%202020/Proses%20V4%201/CR%20V3%202%202020/CR%20Ikmi%232158%20Vol.%203%20No.%202,%202020.doc%23Brezina
file:///D:/2020/ELTEJ%202020/Proses%20V4%201/CR%20V3%202%202020/CR%20Ikmi%232158%20Vol.%203%20No.%202,%202020.doc%23Scheibman
file:///D:/2020/ELTEJ%202020/Proses%20V4%201/CR%20V3%202%202020/CR%20Ikmi%232158%20Vol.%203%20No.%202,%202020.doc%23Halliday
file:///D:/2020/ELTEJ%202020/Proses%20V4%201/CR%20V3%202%202020/CR%20Ikmi%232158%20Vol.%203%20No.%202,%202020.doc%23Halliday
file:///D:/2020/ELTEJ%202020/Proses%20V4%201/CR%20V3%202%202020/CR%20Ikmi%232158%20Vol.%203%20No.%202,%202020.doc%23Dixon
file:///D:/2020/ELTEJ%202020/Proses%20V4%201/CR%20V3%202%202020/CR%20Ikmi%232158%20Vol.%203%20No.%202,%202020.doc%23Table1
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file:///D:/2020/ELTEJ%202020/Proses%20V4%201/CR%20V3%202%202020/CR%20Ikmi%232158%20Vol.%203%20No.%202,%202020.doc%23Stake
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Table 2.  Frequency of verbs types 

Verb type Absolute frequency Percentage (%) 

Material 225 28,4 

Verbal 144 18,2 

Feeling  114 14,4 

Possessive/Relational 78 9,9 

Relational 65 8,2 

Perception 58 7,3 

Cognition verbs 56 7,1 

Existential  23 2,9 

Corporeal 22 2,8 

Perception/Relational 6 0,8 

Total 791 100% 

 

Table 3.  Detailed description of the verb frequencies 

Rank Verb type Example Token 

frequency 

Total 

frequency 

Percentage 

(%) 
1 Material Do 14 225 28,4 

Go 31 

Take 41 

Teach 4 

Work 30 

Use 56 

Play 17 

Come 32 
2 Verbal Say 65 144 18,2 

Talk 3 

Mean 23 
Tell 13 
Ask 9 

3 Feeling Like 6 114 14,4 

Want 14 
Feel 11 
Need 73 
Bother 1 

Enjoy 9 
4 Perception Look 20 78 9,9 

See 34 
Hear 6 

Find 17 
Notice 1 

5 Possessive/relational Have 49 65 8,2 
Get 12 

6 Relation Get 4 58 7,3 
Become 54 

7 Cognition Know 30 56 7,1 
Think 23 

Remember 3 
8 Existential Stay  2 23 2,9 

Happen 21 
9 Corporeal Eat 3 22 2,8 

Sleep 1 
Live 18 

10 Perception/relational Look 6 6 0,8 



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Table 3 shows some examples of material verbs found in the corpus. There are verbs, such as 
take (41 occurrences), come (32 occurrences), go (31 occurrences), work (30 occurrences), play (17 
occurrences), and teach (4 occurrences). The second most frequent verb is verbal and the most 
frequent verb in this type is say (65 occurrences), followed by mean (23 occurrences). As with the 
third most frequent is feeling type with the verb need (73 occurrences) and want (14) as the most 
frequent members of the type. 

 The less frequent verb types also comprise several verbs as displayed in Table 3. For 
instance, perception type has the verb see with 34 occurrences as its most frequent member. As for 
possessive/relational type, there is have with 49 occurrences and relational type has the verb 
become with 54 occurrences as their most frequent verbs. Following these results, there are the least 
frequent verbs in the corpus, such as existential, corporeal, and perception/relational verbs. In 
existential type, the verb happen occurs 21 times, the verb live in corporeal type occurs 18 times and 
the verb look in perception/relational type occurs 6 times.  

4.2. The Relation between Frequency and Text Characteristics  

This section explores the plausible relation between the frequency of verbs and the characteristics 
of opinion texts. As every text works distinctively, it is compelling to examine the linguistic 
features, i.e. the use of verbs in a particular text, i.e. opinion texts. As pointed out by Biber and 
Conrad (2009), the difference between news texts and opinion texts is related to factuality. In news 
texts, factuality plays a salient role, as it is the core of the text, while opinion texts express argument 
or perspective of the author as an individual or member of a certain institution or society. This is 
supported with the result of the studies done by Bednarek and Caple (2012) and Biber and Conrad 
(2009) identifying that there are some discrepancies of the use of modals among texts in newspaper 
(i.e. news, feature, opinion).  

With regard to verb types compiled by Scheibman (2001), Oktavianti and Ardianti (2019) show 
that the most frequent verb type in news texts is verbal (e.g. say, tell) and  Oktavianti and Pramesti, 
(2019) describe that in feature texts, material type is the most frequent one. In this study, material 
type dominates the opinion corpus. It can be assumed that material verb type takes an important role 
in building opinion because the author writes their opinion, argues or reacts about something that is 
related to concrete action. In the delivery argument or ideology, the author needs to be as clear as 
possible, so concrete verbs are necessary and significantly used to convey the message to the 
audience. In the description of the opinion, one must explain the issue or event concretely. It is in 
line with the nature of opinion column in newspaper that reacts to a factual event or issue containing 
concrete activities from people involved in the issue or event. It is not surprising then to find out that 
material verbs occupy the highest percentage of use. For instance, the verb use is used to describe 
concrete activity related to a thing or object. Likewise, other material verbs (e.g., take, work, come 
and go) can be found in the corpus.  

The second most frequent verb type in opinion column is verbal type. This type has the verb say 
as its dominant verb in which this verb is prominent in delivering information as mentioned in 
(Lewis, 2014). Therefore, verbal verbs are used to describe or to assist the delivery of an idea or 
argument about an issue or event. Following verbal type in the second position, the third most 
frequent verb type is feeling. Feeling verbs serve as the verbs to state emotional aspects and 
wanting. The function of feeling verb is related to how the author’s point of view about the event or 
issue being discussed. These verbs then suit the need of opinion articles. Biber and Conrad (2009) 
state that opinions express arguments of the author and try to persuade the readers to think the same 
way. It is not surprising that this verb type is pretty frequent in the opinion corpus. 

Unlike other prior types, the verbs belong to perception, possessive/relational, relational, and 
cognition types are less frequently used in the corpus (but not the least ones).  Based on the nature of 
opinion or editorial, perception and possessive/relational tend to be more subjective and personal in 
expressing opinion. Perception verbs are specifically used in relation to senses, hence irrelevant with 
building opinions. Meanwhile, cognition verbs are types of verbs expressing mental action or 
concerned with the act of process of knowing, perceiving, etc. This verb type is basically quite 
relevant with the purpose of delivering argument, but it is somehow less frequently used in the 
corpus. This is not because of the verb, e.g. know, is lesser than any other verbs since it occurs 30 

file:///D:/2020/ELTEJ%202020/Proses%20V4%201/CR%20V3%202%202020/CR%20Ikmi%232158%20Vol.%203%20No.%202,%202020.doc%23Table3
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times, but the number of variants in the types (found in the corpus) is limited. There are only know, 
remember, think found in the data showing that although we need them to express opinions, but we 
do not need various cognitive verbs. Compared to material type, there are more verbs belonging to 
the category (e.g. do, go, work, teach, play, etc.) and they are used as well in the texts.  

The last discussion is about the least frequent verb types in opinion texts. Based on the data, there 
are existential, corporeal and perception/relational verb types having the smallest number of 
frequencies among all other verb types in the corpus. This is presumably because of the irrelevance 
of the function of the verb types and the characteristics of opinion text genre. For instance, 
existential verb as the verb describing the details of the event is one of the least frequent types since 
it is most likely to be used in hard news texts. Oktavianti and Ardianti (2019) find that existential 
verb like happen occupies the third most frequent type since this feature is important to report an 
event in news text. This type, in the contrary, is not necessary in the writing of opinion, thus it is less 
likely to be used. 

Similar to existential type, corporeal verbs are very rare in the corpus. This verb type refers to 
bodily gesture and interactions (Scheibman, 2001). However, opinion articles are less likely to 
describe about bodily gesture or interaction individual and focus more on argumentation and the 
like. It is not surprising to find out that this type is rarely used in the corpus. Meanwhile, 
perception/relational type has the lowest frequency of verbs found in the opinion or editorial in the 
Jakarta post. This corresponds with the function perception/relational of type of verb to describe 
perception through the perspective of the object (not a human), which is to some extent not in 
accordance with the necessity to express someone’s opinion convincingly. Thus, this type is rarely 
used in opinion articles (as found in the corpus). In other words, linguistic units that are not in 
accordance with the task of opinion to deliver argument on an issue are not pretty much needed, 
even though they are still used with lower frequency.  

To summarize the relation between frequency and opinion text characteristics, Table 4 presents 
the highlighted points in relation to the most frequent verb types.  

Table 4.  Relation between frequency and characteristics of text 

Most frequent type The nature of the verb type The necessity of the verb type in 
opinion text 

Material to express concrete actions to portray the issue or event  
Verbal to deliver message to assist the description of the information 

of factual event 
Feeling to express emotion and wanting to express opinion toward the issue or event 

more personally so that the readers can get 
along with the feeling of the author 

 

There are, however, some points to underline. From the data and the analysis, it is evident that verb 
types with lower frequencies deal with the irrelevance of the nature of the verbs with the 
characteristics of the texts. This result corresponds to the result of some previous studies (Biber & 
Conrad, 2009; Biber & Quirk, 2012). The more frequent use of certain verb types in opinion texts 
indicates that a particular text might need a particular linguistic unit more frequently. The result of 
this study is in line with those done by Hardjanto (2016) and Staples et al. (2018). This study also 
shows that, even within the same register, there might some slight differences among its sub-
registers, as found in Biber (2012), Biber and Conrad (2009), and Hardjanto (2016). However, the 
lower frequency might also be related to the variants of the verb type are minimal in the corpus so 
that they accumulate low frequency. As in cognition types that are negligible in the corpus due to the 
limited verb variants of the type in the corpus compiled in this study. These points, therefore, should 
be investigated further in the following studies comprehensively using a larger amount of data and 
from more various newspapers. 

5. Conclusion 

The findings of the study show that there are three most frequent types of verbs in the opinion 
articles of The Jakarta Post; they are material, verbal and feeling in the corpus of opinion or editorial 

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column of The Jakarta Post. Along with the most frequent types, there are some less frequent ones, 
such as perception, possessive/relational, relational, and cognition types, and the least ones are 
existential, corporeal and perception/relational verb types. These frequencies reveal that that there 
is a relationship between text category and the tendency of verb choices. As opinion texts convey 
argument, it is plausible to find feeling verb type belong to the third most frequent types, along with 
material type to show concrete actions and verbal type to deliver the message. Meanwhile, the least 
frequent verb types include existential, corporeal and perception/relational types and most of them 
are less frequently used in opinion texts because of the irrelevance with the text purpose and/or the 
number of the type variants in the corpus is limited. This study shows that lower frequency can be 
either connected to the characteristics of texts or the limited verb variants of the type. The latter, 
however, needs further investigation.  

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