When making pie, all ingredients must be chilled. Including you: Lexical, syntactic and interactive features in online discourse – a synchronic study of food blogs

The present study describes food blogs as a genre of computer-mediated communication (CMC). The combined approach of corpus linguistic and pragmatic methods reveals the characteristics of food blogs as a hybrid genre that mixes elements from various other discourse types. Lexical and syntactic analyses depict the use and frequencies of (1) CMC related phenomena: innovative vocabulary and spelling; (2) food related jargon: specialized vocabulary, grammatical patterns; (3) phenomena related to spoken interaction: discourse markers, hedges and address. The pragmatic analysis reviews these elements in their blog context. They contribute to creating an audience directed text through features such as humor, repetition and expert knowledge. We thus provide evidence that one of the main goals of this discourse type is interaction and describe how this interaction is systematically achieved.