Involved Versus Informational Production in Profit and Non Profit Organizational Websites:A Corpus-Based Study

Abstract

The present study examines the language of organizational websites as a register through Multidimensional Analysis (MD) given by Douglas Biber’s (1988). Corpus was collected and complied from five hundred homepages of organizational websites of goods and services like Pakistan, India, United States of America, United Kingdom and Australia. Data was tagged by ‘MD’ tagger developed by Douglas Biber (1988). Dimension 1 of MD Analysis was used to analyze data. The scores and frequencies of linguistic features were calculated quantitatively while the data was interpreted qualitatively. By analyzing the co-occurrence of linguistic features, the research tried to establish online organizational websites of various cultures as ‘promotional register’ but it made the idea clear that organizational websites or advertisement language is a language to promote information and product. The results of this research showed that advertisement language is highly informational and less involved. It has the quality of involvedness also but that is very least in number. The nature of organizational websites is neither involved nor hybrid. It is basically informational according to the present study.