Use of Present Tense in Online University Prospectus

Abstract

The language of online university prospectus, a promotional variety, is receiving an increasing amount of attention in the literature of higher education (HE) marketing. The studies conducted within the linguistic framework, all of them based on limited data, report that the ‘present tense’ appears with a great frequency in online university prospectus. The current research, based on a very large corpus, explores how far present tense is frequent in online university prospectus. For the said purpose, the corpus of total 500 universities from Pakistan, India, Australia, U.K. and the U.S.A was built and used to investigate the research question. Taking the Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English (LGSWE) (Biber et al., 1999) as a reference guide, the use of present tense was explored in university prospectus. The results were analyzed on the basis of frequency of present tense use in online university prospectuses of Pakistan, India, Australia, U.K. and the U.S.A. The results showed that frequency of present tense is higher than frequency of past tense in all sections of online university prospectus as it satisfies the purpose of using ‘on-line’ language.

Keywords: online university prospectus, higher education (HE) marketing, corpus