Published: 2010
Total Pages:
Get eBook
In the last decade, computer-mediated communication has emerged as a promising new field of research in linguistics. One of its main objectives today is the generic description of novel Internet-based forms of communication, e.g. websites, chats, message boards. While some of these forms have already been investigated in great detail, others remain largely unexplored. Especially the weblog is so far unchartered territory, despite its growing impact in various social, economic and political affairs. This study hopes to close this gap in CMC research. It provides the first exhaustive, corpus-based studies on one of the most pervasive weblog genres on the Internet, personal weblogs. The genre is not only analysed in its formal dimension but, more importantly, in its discursive (cohesive) scope. To this end, the distribution of various grammatical and lexical cohesive relations will be elicited both within and between weblogs. As a result, we gain a precise cohesive profile of personal weblogs that enables us to perform a contrastive analysis with cohesive profiles of prototypical spoken dialogues (two-party and three-party conversations) and written monologues (academic articles). To this end, one is able to pinpoint more exactly the extent to which weblogs actually "bridge" websites and Internet chats. Against popular opinion, the results of the study evidence that personal weblogs are much more similar to written monologues than to spoken dialogues. In fact, they show that the cohesive interaction between weblog author(s) and user(s) is largely restricted to few recurring patterns. This finding holds a number of important implications for the way we conceive of weblogs today.