BlogEng: variation across speech and writing

Blogs have been studied from many standpoints and research literature has focused on different aspects, such as the sociodemographics of bloggers and individuals’ motivations for using a specific medium (Papacharissi 2004; Herring et al. 2005a, 2005b; Kaye 2005; Nowson and Oberlander 2006; Li 2007; Sanderson 2008). However, as Thibault maintains, blogs can be studied in broader terms, also because the possibility of hypertexting in digital media has reshaped language, and in particular written language (2012). This paper explores variation across speech and writing in blogs on a purposely created corpus of c. 1 million words. Based on Halliday’s view on language modes and language mode variation (1987 [2002]), this work investigates how speech and writing are intertwined in hybrid digital texts, sampling blogs in networking communities (e.g. LiveJournal) as a case study. Variation across speech and writing has been traditionally studied using multifeature/multidimensional analysis (cf. MF/MD analysis, Biber 1988). However, other studies attest that lexical-based corpus analyses can reliably approximate MF/MD results (Tribble 1999; Scott, Tribble 2006). Assuming that a lexico-grammatical approach can explain how the traditional categories of speech and writing are blended in blogging environments, this study reports on how the corpus has been built and explored to account for language mode variation, using keyness analysis and lexical bundle analysis (Sindoni in press). Hybridity is a notion that has been invoked in some quarters to account for digital textuality, but will be applied in this study more specifically as resulting from oral, written and multimodal combinations of verbal and semiotic resources (Sindoni 2011). The widely accepted and somewhat vaguely defined assumption that blogs are hybrid texts will be thus scrutinized and eventually validated through empirical data.