Browsing by Subject "syntactic structures"

This study describes personal chronic pain blog entries written in English by defining the common text types in the blogs. Text types are defined as text-classifying tools that combine a clause-level structural perspective and a whole-text level category perspective. On the clause level, each clause is defined as representing one of five Werlich's text types that reflect author focus on cognitive processes. The study also explores the effect of author socio-demographic attributes of gender, age and duration of chronic pain on the text types identfied in the analysis. Chronic pain is a common health condition that also affects the sufferer’s focus of attention. The text types in chronic pain blogs have not been studied even though studies have found that blog writing has therapeutic effects on pain management for chronic pain sufferers. Studies have also identified several purposes for writing chronic pain blogs. The purposes have been found to change for some of the chronic pain blog writers. Previous studies on blog types suggest two common text types. A combined qualitative-quantitative analysis of text-typical clauses and blog entries was conducted on a sample of 26 whole-text entries. The sample consists of two entries from 13 authors with total of 1068 clauses. Additionally, a socio-linguistic variable analysis was conducted with text types as dependent variables and author attributes as independent variables. The data was gathered with a combined purposive-snowball method with author chronic pain condition and personal authorship as sample selection criteria. The results show some overlapping analytical criteria for clause-level text types. The most frequent text types are identified as combinations of argumentation, instruction and narration with argumentation being surprisingly high in prevalence. The text-typical variation does not seem to be an effect of a specific author variable although the socio-linguistic analysis is not proved as statistically significant because of the small sample size. Further study on text types is suggested in a combined interpersonal feature and text type analysis of chronic pain blog entries. A different approach is also suggested in identification and comparison of hierarchical and text-organizational features such as Theme-Rheme analysis of clauses.