This study is based on a corpus of 2400 clauses taken from British national newspapers in 1986 and stored in a computer database with each clause coded for a number of grammatical (and some semantic) features. These features relate to the verb phrase (e.g. finiteness), the clause (e.g. subordination) and the subject (e.g. form). In the first stage of the investigation the database is described in terms of the features coded therein. The scope of the description is on three levels. First, the data are described in total and are considered to constitute a representative sample of newspaper English. Secondly, the database is split into three pre-determined sub-databases according to their text-type. These are: news articles, editorials and readers' letters. A pattern is discovered of 'letters-as-norm' with the other texttypes on different sides of the average. Thirdly, the database is split on a different dimension according to the eight different newspapers included in the sampling. A pattern of three groups of newspapers; 'quality', 'central' and 'popular', is found for some features. The second section exploits the database primarily as an example of written English, rather than emphasising its newspaper origins. Here some problems of description, which have implications for the debate about the division between syntax and semantics, are explored. The first such 'problem' arises out of a study of the environment of copula 'BE' and concerns the borderline between the grammatical functions of subject and subject complement. Some well-known differences are confirmed and some new ones discovered. A small area of overlap, however, remains. The second problem is the familiar difficulty of deciding when an -en form is an adjective and when it remains a participle. It is argued that the contexts of -en forms are often influential in their interpretation as adjectival or verbal forms. The third problem concerns the sequential verbs (sometimes called 'catenative' verbs) which govern a following nonfinite verb phrase. These verbs, which defy attempts to classify them syntactically, are shown to be amenable to semantic classification. The question of restrictions on sequences of more than two verb phrases (i.e. two sequential verbs + one 'normal' verb) is explored and some tentative conclusions are reached.

In recent times, newspapers have been considered to be an important medium for providing people with news, views and many other sources of information from all over the world related to their daily lives. The language of any given newspaper is acknowledged as a modern form of any language which may unavoidably bear the influence of another language/s, particularly English in the modern era. Many studies have been carried out to investigate the influence of English on the language of newspapers in different languages from different perspectives. The current study is one of these studies. It is mainly concerned with investigating the influence of English on Arabic in the context of Saudi Arabian newspapers within a period of five years between 2010 and 2015, and in exploring the use of English borrowings during this period and how they unfolded over the years. Three Saudi newspapers were selected to be surveyed and all relevant English borrowings were extracted and classified according to five semantic categories: politics, economics, culture, sports, and science and technology. In addition, the study included a questionnaire to draw on the attitude and perceptions of a number of Saudi newspapers‟ readers and writers (377 participants) towards this linguistic practice. The result of the study suggests that English borrowings are diffused in the context of the selected Saudi newspapers and their use was applied to all designated semantic categories in both years; 2010 and 2015, with different levels of quantity and frequency under each semantic category. Also, the result suggests that there is a tendency among the Saudi participants to resist this linguistic practice.