Browsing by Author "McVeigh, Joseph"

Although the genres of blogs and marketing have been studied, the sub-genres of single-topic blogs and email marketing have not received as much attention by scholars. An account of the ways that these sub-genres use language to meet their goals or purposes is needed to see whether they follow similar patterns of the larger genres that contain them. Since research on the blogging and marketing genres has already been done, a comparative analysis is possible. This thesis analyzes the linguistic properties of blog and marketing texts which share a topic (labor and employment law) and discourse community (lawyers), but which have different goals (exposition vs. promotion). Drawing on previous genre and corpus linguistics research, I wish to answer two related questions. First, I want to know how the two sub-genres differ in terms of their linguistic properties. Second, I want to see whether a comparison of the texts from the two sub-genres is really possible or whether it would be just like comparing apples to oranges. A combination of corpus linguistic and genre analysis methods are used to compare the lexico-grammatical properties of the texts from the two sub-genres. An analysis is then made of the rhetorical moves in certain texts which share the same micro-topic (DISCRIMINATION). Throughout the analysis, the extra-textual properties of the two sub-genres are taken into account to see how they might affect the language of the texts. The results show that texts from single-topic blogs and email marketing do not always divide easily based on either their genres or expectations from previous research.