Language and Power in Blogs : Interaction, Disagreements and Agreements

Abstract

<i>Language and Power in Blogs</i> systematically analyses the discursive practices of bloggers and their readers in eight English-language personal/diary blogs. The main focus is thereby placed on ties between these practices and power. The book demonstrates that the exercise of power in this mode can be studied via the analysis of conversational control (turn-taking, speakership and topic control), coupled with research on agreements and disagreements. In this vein, it reveals that control of the floor is strongly tied not solely to rates of participation, but more strikingly to the types of contributions interlocutors make. With its detailed linguistic analyses and comprehensive theoretical and methodological treatment of language use and power, the book is interesting for researchers and students working within the domains of pragmatics, discourse analysis, text linguistics and corpus linguistics, in both offline and online settings.