Discourse in BlogEng. A multimodal corpus linguistics analysis.

Blogs have been investigated from a range of fields of studies, such as linguistics, media and communication studies, computer-mediated-communication (CMC), among others. The language of blogs in English (blogEng, cf. Sindoni 2013) is the focus of analysis of this paper. Based on Halliday's notion of language mode variation (1987 [2002]), this work investigates how verbal and non verbal resources are intertwined in blog entries in a social networking community (i.e. LiveJournal). Considering that lexical corpus-based analyses can reliably approximate MF/MD results (Tribble 1999; Scott, Tribble 2006), this approach can explain how the traditional categories of speech and writing are blended in blogging environments, also taking the contribution of other resources into account. Variation is thus studied in two sub-corpora extracted from a larger corpus studied elsewhere (cf. Sindoni 2013), respectively analyzing spoken/written variation and observing how multimodal resources are used in combination with verbal language. Furthermore, the integration and relative status of each resource within the two sub-corpora have been investigated, invoking the new notion of resource-switching (Sindoni 2013). This study reports on how the corpora have been tagged and annotated and how they have been explored to account for language mode variation, using keyness and lexical bundle analysis. Furthermore, reflections on spoken-like and written-like discourse features and on the use of other multimodal resources are provided in the concluding remarks.