Multidimensional Analysis of Two Sub-Genres in Newspaper Language

Abstract

The present study aims at multidimensional analysis of two sub-genres i.e. newspaper editorials and letters to the editor from newspapers’ language to determine their functional relations. The study assumes that editorials and letters to the editors have same communicative function. This is because of the fact that an editorial is a voice of newspaper and a letter to the editor is of reader but which features have kept them in different sub-genres?  For the sake of investigation, the corpus has been collected from both sub-genres individually i.e. corpus of newspaper editorials with 15530 number of tokens and corpus of letters to the editors with 15601 number of tokens. After the application of  multidimensional analysis, it is appeared that both the genres are falling in one dimension i.e. General Narrative Exposition however, at the same time there comes a difference regarding positive and negative loadings upon dimensions with more negative loadings upon letters to the editors than editorials showing that the letters are less communicative than editorials. Further the analysis is being done for z-scores of both sub-genres, the interesting variables of editorials are TSUB, [SERE] and [SPIN] while for letters are RB & PHC. These scores represent that letters have simple linguistic structures as they have more variations on word-level and phrase-level features while editorials are complex textual structures with more variations upon sentence or clause-level features.

Keywords: multidimensional approach, newspaper discourse, comparative genre analysis