| Since the middle1990s, with the fast development of the Internet, weblogs have become a newly-emerged popular method of online communication after the numerous use of e-mail, chatting room and online forum. The first appearance of the word weblog, made up of two words web and log, was in1997. It’s generally acknowledged that Peter Merholz named its abbreviation blog.The first weblogs in China were introduced in2000and they became popular in2005. The total number of the blog users reached300million by the year2011. Weblogs are called in Chinese Wangluo rizhi网络日志(log book on the Internet), or Wangzhi网志in abbreviation. Containing both the meanings of blogs and bloggers, Boke博客seems to be a much popular and frequently used name instead. Wang Junxiu王俊秀and Fang Xingdong方兴东created this name, while they themselves are famous bloggers.Weblogs are arranged in an inverse order of occurrence, so the latest updated article is placed at the very top of the article list. As a rule, weblogs also contains links. Besides, calendar and archive allow the readers to read faster with ease. Readers could also comment on the blogs freely.With the rapid growth of weblogs, researchers in the fields of sociology and media studies have shown an increasing interest in their applications as well as their influences on politics, economics and journalism. Weblogs are mentioned by many documents in the same breath with news media. Furthermore, the number of linguistic studies of e-mail, online forum and chatting room rose since the middle1990s. In comparison to the great interest in the other Internet-based text types and methods of communication and some explorations and analysis into them, linguists only paid little heed to weblogs. So far they have not come up with a systematic study in weblogs, especially in the field of linguistics. On account of linguistic desideratum and cultural differences, I would like to work on those weblogs in terms of text linguistic questions firstly and carry out a contrastive analysis between German and Chinese in addition.In my study, German and Chinese soccer blogs are analyzed from the perspective of text linguistics and stylistics. This empiric research has its data material collected from20German and20Chinese blogs with over200,000words about soccer. The corpus in each blog is selected from the latest blog articles, all of which totally contain5000words and are published by the end of2008. The German corpus consists of weblogs, which are in a list of German soccer blogs. The blogs that were active until December2008are selected. Because there’s no list of Chinese soccer blogs, I have searched the keyword zuqiuboke足球博客(soccer blog) in Google and collected each five Chinese blogs from four blog service providers, which have the most active bloggers in China according to statistics.Throughout the development of text linguistics, the text types have not been clearly defined. However, text cohesion, text structure, text theme and text function are regarded as four important categories for text analysis. My text linguistic analyses are performed with the concept indication, which is introduced by Hausdorf and Kesselheim, in terms of four categories mentioned above. It raises the following questions:What kinds of texts exist in soccer blogs? Which indications do they have? Are they different from the text types in newspaper or other traditional media? Why do they differ from each other?Due to text linguistic study, it’s certain that narrative and argumentative text structures dominate soccer blogs. Accordingly, information and opinions texts take a large proportion among the blogs. Besides the typical text types message and report, some special text types appear in the German corpus such as live-blog, lineup, transfer rumor, while opinions texts in Chinese blogs appear with absolute dominance.In the linguistic analysis of new media, the concept of media/conceptual orality and literacy from Koch/Oesterreicher (1985:1994) are of great importance. The realization of an utterance in this model is divided dichotomously:phonic (oral) and graphical (literal). In terms of the conception, which shows the modality of realization, orality and literacy are two poles and make up a continuum, in which all text types could be arranged between the two poles in accordance with’ close’or’ distant’ association. Both of the termini are related to the situations of communication. They are arranged with regard to the closeness or the distance with communication partners, publicness, familiarity with partners, emotionality, integration of situation and action, relationship of the reference, communicative cooperation, dialogue/monologue, spontaneity, fixation of topics and so on. In the field of linguistics, the features of the conceptual orality are distinguished from those of the conceptual literacy:oral lexical specifics, simpler syntax, marked word order, unclear sentence boundaries, more cliches, changeless vocabularies, vague cohesion and so on. The stylistic features are researched by means of the following questions:What kinds of language forms and features appear in the blogs? To what extent are they typical of blogs? How much are blogs based on the other text types and the forms of communication on the Internet? Where should weblog be on the continuum of conceptual orality and literacy? On account of questions above, the stylistic phenomena embrace orthographic, lexical, syntactic, typographical and hyper textual viewpoints.In all weblogs, which are under research, there are some errors, most of which are orthographic mistakes and careless mistakes. They are caused mainly by the informative, private and free communication situation. Their difference in frequency also depends on status of the blog and blogger’s routine use of words. In addition, lexical use, syntactic ellipses and typographic features are all dependent6n the Internet-based written communication. Beside linguistic aspects, weblogs are still marked by their hypertextuality, which is manifested by the combination of text, image, video and hyperlinks.As a result of empirical research, it is concluded that weblogs tend to collect different text types and mix them. From the textual perspective, weblogs, especially soccer blogs, are comparable with the press. In consequence of linguistic research, it is realized that orthographic norms are much more followed in soccer blogs as online publication than in online chatting. On the other hand, they are compared to the press in a relatively bondless style. Despite the possibility of publication, rapid spreading and abundant information of weblogs, they could not replace the traditional press, because their information is not well edited and their resources are without control. They are used as an alternative to information acquisition due to their immediacy and abundance of information. Although some new Internet services such as microblogs have been developing rapidly, blogs are still important to many users, especially to professionals. Free from restriction of time and length, they may represent an event in detail and to discuss it properly. Therefore, it is assumed that blogs will become a medium in which opinions texts with a function of control dominate. |
PDF Full Text Request