Study of Information Generating Linguistic Features in Online University Prospectuses

Abstract

This research studies the function of language of online university prospectuses through 1^st dimension, i.e., involved versus informational production, of multidimensional analysis modeled by Biber (1988). A corpus based methodology is used. Corpus has been collected from about us, facilities, department, and vice chancellor message and library sections of Pakistan, UK and India. Multidimensional tagger (v 1.0) is used to tag and analyze the data. Scores and co-occurrences of linguistic features are calculated quantitatively and are interpreted qualitatively through 1^st dimension of multidimensional analysis. The results show that online university prospectuses are informational in its nature. Cross culturally, India is highly informational and UK is less informational due to their highest negative and less negative score respectively. It is also observed that department section is highly informational and vice chancellor is less informational and more interactional in their nature. Highly informational texts are carefully written and provide bundles of information.

Keywords: Online university prospectuses, Multidimensional analysis, Corpus, Co-occurrence of linguistic features, Informational features, Involved features