Corpus Based Study of Private and Public Verbs in online University Prospectus

Abstract

The aim of this research is to identify the grammatical and communicative functions performed by the semantic category of verbs, i.e. Private verbs and Suasive verbs. A corpus was compiled from 200 universities of two countries namely as: Pakistan and India. The data was collected from three different parts of prospectus, i.e., About us, Facilities and VC messages. For this study, multidimensional tagger analysis was used as theoretical framework. MAT Tagger was used for the tagging of linguistic features as well as counting the frequencies of selected linguistic features. On the basis of distributional pattern, the communicative functions was investigated performed by these verbs according to the grammatical structure and functions with the association of co-occurring lexical items. The results shows that private verbs and Suasive verbs are extensively used in all the sections of Pakistan with highest frequency than in the sections of India. On the basis of these pervasive features, the research proved that these verbs perform the function of information, marketing as well as persuasion.

Keywords: Higher Education Marketing, Online University Verbs, Register analysis, Private Verbs, Suasive Verbs.