LAUSR

In computer-mediated communication, the medium of blogs is typically viewed as consisting of posts composed by blog authors and comments which may be left by their readers. This study explores the relationship between these constituent parts of blogs and investigates the pragmatic ties that are established between blog posts and comments. The focus is on the preface position in comments, that is the very first position at the onset of a comment, to discover how they are generally introduced and which specific linguistic constructions are used to initiate them. The aim is to uncover how speaker changes – from blog author to commenter – are signalled linguistically, in addition to the blog specific metadata provided by the interface (e.g. the username or time stamp), and which pragmatic means are used to develop interpersonal relationships between users. Results show that the preface position of blog comments is fertile ground for the occurrence of expressive speech acts with commenters often initiating their comments by thanking or complimenting blog authors, which opens up further opportunity for the study of speech acts in large corpora.