A Corpus-Based Study of Explicit Versus Situation Dependent Reference in Online University Prospectus

This research explores the language of online university prospectus of different cultures as a register in connection with the third dimension of Douglas Biber’s (1988) model of Multidimensional Analysis (MD), i.e. Explicit Versus Situation Dependent Reference. The corpus has been collected and compiled from four hundred sixty prospectuses of the universities of Pakistan, India, United States of America, United Kingdom and Australia. A corpus-based methodology is used. The data has been analyzed through Biber’s MAT (Multidimensional Analysis Tagger) and dimensional scores are computed in consideration of the features related to Dimension 3 of MD analysis. By analyzing the co-occurrence of linguistic features, this research tries to explore how the prospectuses, produced across the five countries, lie on the continuum of Explicit vs. situation dependent discourse. Keywords: Multidimensional Analysis, Online University prospectus, Dimension 3,Corpus-based, Linguistic Feature