Cohesive Profiling: Meaning and Interaction in Personal Weblogs

Cohesive Profiling provides one of the first linguistic descriptions of blog discourse, focusing on the cohesive relations which enable users to construe blogs as compatible meaningful wholes. With a corpus-based analysis of cohesive relations in personal blogs, the study surprisingly reveals that there is only limited cohesive rapport between the textual contributions of blog authors and readers. The book retraces blogs’ technological, linguistic and generic evolution and describes how today’s blog genres are structured and composed. Additionally, it is shown how cohesive interaction, shared knowledge and technological expertise converge in blog readers trying to keep track of blog topics, purposes and identities over time. The book is of interest to researchers in discourse analysis, corpus linguistics and pragmatics as well as to scholars working in the field of computer-mediated communication.