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

Effects of English Pop Music on Pakistani Teenagers: An Online Survey Study

This study investigates the effects of English pop music on the language of Pakistani youth. Online survey through questionnaire method has been employed to ascertain the myth and reality of the established notions. It questions the existing hypothesis and contention held by the researchers that teenagers, when interacted in the English language with their peers, often utter offensive slangs. This trend was considered to be more prevalent among male subjects as compared to female community in Pakistan. One of the key reasons noticed was an addiction to English pop music and hence was selected for the present study. Daily interactions of hundred teen males and females, addicted to English pop music, were observed randomly. All the respondents solved the questionnaire via Facebook IDs.  The collected results were analysed through social science software SPSS 20. Application of paired sample t-test revealed astonishingly contradictory results. The hypothesis cherished earlier proved that female teenagers use more abusive language and slangs than males. Keywords: English pop music, Abusive slangs, SPSS 20 Software, Online poll, t-Tes