A Contrastive Study Of The Stylistic Features Of Blog And The Following Comments

Along with the drastic speed of the development of the Internet, comes the various ways of language usage which have, fortunately, already drawn attention of many linguists, realizing the significance of looking into the language variety brought about with the changes in the media. The Web-Log, better known as the "Blog", has become an increasingly important phenomenon and has crept into our personal lives, political atmosphere and the news of the world.The present study intends to investigate the language style of the blog and the following comments respectively and then to make a further comparison between the two variants, and finally to enhance a better understanding of the blog language. The study analyzes eight sample blogs chosen randomly from seven websites of quality newspapers from English-speaking countries, providing guarantee of the authenticity of the language. By applying theories of stylistic analysis, especially linguistic description and contextual factors analysis, the present study deals with what causes the stylistic differences between a blog text and the following comments section dealing with the same issue.At the graphalogical level, the comments area language sees more unconventional ways of expression in comparison with the blog texts language, such as repetitive use of punctuation marks, lower-case letters and intentional capitalization, mis-spelling and spelling deviation, use of punctuations or symbols to realize paralinguistic effects and various ways of paragraphing. At the lexical level, the blog texts and the comments area followed see different picture as far as the usage of personal pronouns are concerned. And the Fog Index of the sample comments is lower than that of the blog texts, which indicates a relatively high readability and accessibility ofthe comments area to be read. At the syntactic/grammatical level, the average sentence length of blog text is longer in comparison with those of the comments area, while the latter is diverse in sentence types. As far as the type of sentences is concerned, there are more minor sentences. Tenses of verbs also differ in the two situations. At the semantic level, the major distinction lies in the frequent use of the rhetorical devices in the comments area.And contextual factors analysis also shed light on the differences between the blog texts and the comments. As demonstrated in the contextual factors analysis, since the blog texts and the following comments do not see distinctions as far as the field of discourse is concerned, the tenor of discourse and the mode of discourse are the two factors leading to different styles.