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Abstract

The present research aims to present comparative analysis of two genres of non-fiction: autobiographies and travelogues. Autobiographies are personal narratives or firsthand accounts of unique or dramatic events of an individual’s life while travelogue is record of a person’s journey to another place and the author’s traveling experiences. The present study explores functional variations that exist in these genres based on the multidimensional analysis approach presented by Biber (1988). This corpus-based research employs triangulation methods to quantitatively analyze statistical techniques and to qualitatively interpret the function of co-occurring linguistic features. Statistical evidence suggests that significant variation exists between two genres with travelogues are more informational, more explicit and less persuasive than autobiographies. Nouns and prepositions are the major constituents of both these first person narratives. This research can be further extended to compare the functional dimensions of autobiographies and travelogues with other first-person narratives. A contrastive genre analysis can also be conducted to explore variations in native and non-native writings.