Lack of Democracy in Zimbabwean Contemporary Politics: a 2011- 2012 Corpus Analysis of Newspaper Articles from the Zimbabwean Herald Online

This study examined the ideological use of lexical and grammatical features in editorial articles published by The Zimbabwe Herald Online between the 1st of January 2011 and the 30th of August 2011. Gathering data within this period was ideal as there was media hype regarding the anticipated end to the inclusive government which had been scheduled for July 2011 following the principles governing Zimbabwe?s Global political agreement of 2009. Thirty editorial articles ranging between 900 tokens to 1200 tokens were transferred into text files. A concordance analysis was then carried out on various node words using a concordance software programme called Antconc 3.2.1 that was developed by Laurence Antony. The lexical features identified were analyzed using Fairclough?s (1989) model of analyzing texts. The same model was used to analyze grammatical features together with Halliday?s (1985) systemic functional grammar. The findings revealed that the writers of the articles analyzed made ideological use of lexical and grammatical features to maintain unrepentant pro Zanu- PF ideologies.