Investigating Linguistic Variation of Pakistani Online Fiction Book Reviews: A Multidimensional Study

Abstract

Recent technological advancement on social media and the internet has given
popularity to the online book review and acknowledged it as a distinctive
register. The research aims to explore the linguistic variation of Pakistani
online fiction book reviews with Biber (1988) five textual dimensions. A
specialized corpus of these book reviews was developed through online
newspapers, magazines and academic journals spanning over 10 years. The
compiled corpus was analyzed by employing Biber (1988) multidimensional
tagger. To explore the distinct identity of Pakistani online fiction book reviews
as a register, the current research aims to explore linguistic variation across
three mediums on five textual dimensions of Biber’s 1988 study. The findings
of the study reveal Pakistani academic writing as highly informational, nonnarrative, exceedingly explicit, non-persuasive and impersonal in style. This
study may be fruitful for journalistic writing courses, social media
professionals, and ESP course developers.