A STUDY ON THE LANGUAGE IN ENGLISH BLOGS WRITTEN BY AMERICAN PEOPLE

Abstract

The study attempts to investigate the language in English blogs written by American people to find out its distinctive linguistic features over conventional diary writing. The linguistic features focused in this thesis are grammatical features and discourse features because 'a text is a semantic unit, not a grammatical one. But meanings are realized through wordings; and without a theory of wording- that is, a grammar- there is no way of making explicit one's interpretation of the meaning of a text. Thus the present interest in discourse analysis is in fact providing a context within which grammar has a central place' [18, p.xvii]. The grammatical features are analyzed basing on the theory of discourse analysis ' A discourse analysis that is not based on grammar is not an analysis at all, but simply a running commentary on a text' [18, p.xvii]. Other distinctive features like paralinguistic cues, linguistic simplifications and structural features are also studied. - Among the various types of blogs, the textual entries from diary blogs are focused on and analyzed, the study attempts to do a survey of as many as 350 textual samples taken from diary blogs written by American people; - The study also wishes to describe the general linguistic features of American diary blogs by contrasting them mainly with the language in already-published conventional diaries. This will give Vietnamese bloggers a better interpretation so as to ease their surfing and writing blog entries in English; - The study is scheduled to be carried out in a time of six months since November, 2007.