| Since the end of last century, blog has come into sight of the public and appealed to more and more netizens in the cyberspace. As a novel mode of communication medium, its impact reaches out into all corners of the whole world. Bloggers see it as both a tool for exchanging information and a play field where they can promote what they do and learn new things. As of February2011, there were more than156million public blogs all around the world in existence. One study has shown that a great many people read others’ blogs everyday and update their own blogs at least once in a month. Many researchers and scholars take a great interest into this new electronic discourse and conduct some researches on it. However, the style of this novel form of discourse has not been defined.This research collects twenty personal blog posts randomly from one of the most popular foreign blog website http://WordPress.com as data, and discuss them in terms of different levels of linguistic description proposed by Crystal and Davy. The analysis focuses on the graphological level, lexical level and syntactic level and at each level specific stylistic features are particularly prominent which distinguish the blog posts from the traditional written discourse and other electronic discourse. Meanwhile, the unique characteristics of personal blog posts are explored as follows:blog posts reflects the author’s distinct personality; blog functions as a free and open platform for negotiation of ideas; blog is socially interactive and the blog entry text is a novel discourse hybrid having qualities from both spoken and written discourse. These form the basis for the analysis in the discussion part.This research produces such findings:referring to the graphological level, a blog post text is often separated into different paragraphs with one blank line in between, and the first line of each paragraph goes without indentation. However, some bloggers set aside the formalities and make their blogs to be distinct. What’s more, repeated or mixed uses of different punctuation marks and questionable capitalization occur in the blog entries with a relatively high frequency. Besides these, some paralinguistic features such as emoticons, pictures and hyperlinks are employed by bloggers which decorate their blog entries and make them more attractive to readers.Referring to the lexical level, bloggers show some preferences for certain choices of vocabulary. The simpler and shorter monosyllables make up a large proportion of the vocabulary in the samples. Abbreviations are especially prevalent among younger bloggers and their usage extends to the daily conversation or even some publications. Onomatopoeic words are applied mainly to imitate human voices and some bloggers do not avoid using swear words to express intense feelings or shorten the distance between the writers and readers.Referring to the syntactic level, the sentence length, sentence patter, sentence structure and tense of sentence are embraced into this study. Shorter sentences like simple sentences and minor sentences are favored by bloggers in comparison to more complicated and longer sentences. In addition to that, blog entries contain more exclamatory sentences and interrogative sentences than traditional written discourse. The study also finds that the most often tenses used in the blog posts are the simple present and simple past tense. Even some writers use the simple present tense instead of the simple past tense in order to recapture their past life experiences.The author believes that this research could help English learners especially teenagers to better understand the authentic language materials as well as gain much familiarity with idiomatic language practices and facilitate the communication in the blogosphere. Due to the interactivity of blogs, teachers can build up a platform on which they are able to make contact with students effectively and share teaching ideology and experiences with other teachers or scholars. |
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