This book outlines a coherent genre history of the personal weblog from the perspective of media linguistics. An analysis of a diachronic corpus (1997-2012) suggests distinct phases in the history of the genre. In addition to media linguistics, the author draws on methods from textual and corpus linguistics as well as the social sciences. He traces the personal weblog's various relations to different on- and offline genres and describes the blog communication form as well as the communicative situation, structural features and several posting genres characteristic of personal weblogs. The...

This volume presents a range of academic approaches to genre emergence which is representative of the currently ongoing research, while retaining a common methodological core. The articles presented here use methods from text linguistics, conversation analysis, literary studies and media linguistics. Different driving forces of genre emergence are identified, e.g. function, communication form and culture. This book also aims to cover the emergence of many different genres: It includes chapters on newspaper and magazine genres, readers' comments, print advertisements, TV news shows and sitcom...