Significance of Non-Narrative Features in Online University Prospectus of Pakistan: A Corpus-Based Investigation

Abstract

The study focuses on the language of online university prospectus of Pakistan to show the significance of non-narrative features in relation to Dimension 2 “Narrative versus Non-narrative Concerns”, of multidimensional analysis postulated by Douglas Biber (1988). The study incorporated a corpus-based investigation. Based on a representative corpus of five sections (about, facilities, department, library and Vice Chancellor message) of online university prospectus of Pakistan, multidimensional analysis was performed with the focus on Dimension 2. Multidimensional Analysis Tagger v 1.0 was used to tag and analyze the data.  Dimension scores and the co-occurrences of the linguistic features were studied through Dimension 2 of multidimensional approach. The results indicate that language of Pakistan university prospectus shows greater concern for non-narrative and it was concluded that language of online university prospectus of Pakistan is argumentative, informational and non-narrative due to the presence of attributive adjective and present tense (non-narrative features) in high proportion. The study has educational as well as marketing implications in educational marketing.

Keywords: Multidimensional analysis, Corpus, Prospectus, Non-narrative features