Constructing Immediacy at a Distance

Abstract

Differences between written and spoken language represent a long-standing topic in linguistics (e.g., Biber 1988; Koch and Oesterreicher 2012; Tannen 1982). This paper1 investigates the comments section of blogs with regard to their nature as involved and expressive, but graphically coded and public discourse type. This type of digital interaction between users and bloggers allows for immediacy at a distance. Hence, blogs and their comments sections represent a fine choice to discuss ComputerMediated Communication (CMC) from the perspective of orality and literacy. Conversely, the comments sections of online blogs allow revisiting the notions of 'orality' and 'literacy' from the vantage point of a present-day internet genre. The focus on a narrowly defined sub-genre, the comments sections of vegan food blogs, will allow zooming in on very specific linguistic characteristics allowing for a comparison of genres according to different situational parameters. This paper embraces the view that differences between 'written' and 'spoken' are non-binary and non-linear, but also multi-dimensional. The non-binary nature of 'spoken' and 'written' has been noted since the late 1960s, also with the advent of genre descriptions. Biber's seminal, emic Variation across Speech and Writing (1988) stresses the multidimensional nature of this textual variation. Biber proposes an analysis of 67 linguistic features that group into seven dimensions such as "informational vs involved" or "narrative vs non-narrative." In the framework of an additive multi-dimensional analysis (MDA) (Berber Sardinha et al. 2019), this paper locates the comments sections of blogs in Biber's dimensions for spoken and written English (1988). To give a concrete example, the comments sections studied in this paper have a similar degree of involvement as the spoken genre 'interview' through the high frequency of subordinator that deletion and the use of emphatics and demonstrative pronouns. Blogs represent a mass phenomenon in CMC with a specific organization of its discourse (Frobenius and Gerhardt 2017). After having focused on the construction of veganism in food blogs (Gerhardt and Schul 2019; Gerhardt 2020b) and the use of no-X constructions such as gluten free or no artificial flavours in their comments section