Exploring Intra-Genre Functional Variation In Pakistani Newspapers - A Comparison Of Political News With Opinion-Based Reportage

Linguistic variation is the main focus in register studies. The current study uses multidimensional analysis to explore internal linguistic variation and language functionality of leading Pakistani English newspapers. Pakistani news language has not been explored extensively in sub-genres however; this study pioneers by comparing the linguistic characteristics of the sub-genres of Pakistani English newspapers, such as political news and opinion-based reportage. Besides examining the linguistic variation between the two sub-genres of newspapers, this multidimensional study reveals the cause of newspaper trending based on language usage by comparing the linguistic functionality of trending English newspapers of Pakistan. The corpus of this study is formulated by collecting 7240 text samples from five leading English newspapers of Pakistan. Current research analyzes the Pakistani English press reportage text on five dimensions as proposed in Biber's (1988) study that leads towards elaboration on each dimension. Moreover, quantitative data is also analyzed statistically for authentication. As it is a triangulated study, so for validation, quantitative data is interpreted qualitatively. Findings of the study reveal heterogenic results in terms of linguistic functionality in political news and opinion based reportage of Pakistani English newspapers. Furthermore, this study unveils that there is great coherence in Pakistani opinion-based reportage, however, political news showed contrary results. In the light of detailed linguistic study on Pakistani English newspapers some recommendations are also formulated for pedagogical implications as well as for future researchers to get advantage from the findings by implementing in their practical fields.