Blogs and Blogging

In this book, I use computer-aided corpus-based research methodology to show that the predictions about the constitutive nature of blogs, which foreground their colloquial or ¿chatty¿ linguistic character drawn from massive language creativity and play, are in fact based on faulty intuitions about language use online. More specifically, I rely on an analytical framework to study linguistic variation in the language of blogs in English and Romanian. I also propose an empirical measure based on the quantification of word category frequencies (the effect/affect score) to develop a more systematic understanding of the importance of context in different situations. Blogs thus emerge as a hybrid genre, a mix of links, musings, and personal notes, each in varying proportions¿hybrid text types that are produced along a continuum, highly involved yet surprisingly informative in topic, irrespective of the functional label their authors assign. By using computer-aided corpus-based methodology, I demonstrate that such hybridity is manifest across languages not only in style but in linguistic form as well.