Application of Multidimensional Analysis on Covid-19 related Editorials of The Nation

Abstract

Aim of this study is to evaluate the strategies of editorials’ texts written during Covid-19. In order to fulfill the said purpose, The Nation was selected through purposive sampling technique which was employed to select this newspaper that has wide readership and it is available online as well. 198 editorials specifically addressing Covid-19 issue were gathered to form a corpus. For the analysis, Biber’s multidimensional model 1995 was utilized. After selection and compilation, data was tagged through MAT Tagger. The raw data obtained after tagging was further processed using factor analysis. The five dimensions obtained showed varied patterns in closest text types these include broadcasts, personal letters, conversations, official documents, and academic prose. The results in form of mean values of linguistic features, tables and graphs revealed that the collected corpus is written in abstract manner that contains linguistic features which perform the function of provides information in overtly, and explicitly in a narrative style.