Linguistic Variation among Newspapers in Pakistani Print Media

A Multidimensional Analysis

Abstract

The present study uses multi-dimensional analysis to elaborate the internal variation among the leading newspapers taking into account the press reportage in Pakistani print media. From variationist’s perspective, previous quantitative studies have just focused on the individual linguistic features of the language of Pakistani press reportage but the internal variation among the newspapers as well as among the sub-categories of Pakistani news register have not so far been explored which is a marked feature of register studies. The present study is pioneering in nature and investigates new textual dimensions in Pakistani press reportage after applying new factor analysis on Pakistani News Corpus. Drawing on a special-purpose corpus based on the sub-categories of press reportage from Pakistani media, the present study identifies four new textual dimensions and labelled them: “Reporting of Concrete Issues vs Discussion of Abstract Information”, “Opinion-based reporting”, “Policy-based Discourse vs Other Concerns” and “Event-based reporting vs Person-based reporting”. Significant statistical linguistic differences among the newspapers of Pakistani print media with reference to each sub-category of press reportage are observed through factorial ANOVAs and different patterns of linguistic variability are interpreted on newly explored four textual dimensions. Factorial ANOVAs are applied among the leading Pakistani newspapers on each sub-category of Pakistani press reportage and the interpretation of linguistic variation among newspapers on each sub-category is elaborated on the new textual dimensions. Among all the newspapers, the analysis of the study reveals that the language of The Frontier Post newspaper is the most distinct on all four textual dimensions.