Thank you for thinking we could: Use and function of interpersonal pronouns in corporate web logs [12/28/09]

This paper examines the function and use of first person and second person pronouns (inter-personal pronouns or IPPs) in Internet blogs maintained by several major U.S. companies for marketing and public relations purposes and evaluates their significance as a genre marker. After briefly assessing prior research on blogs in general and corporate blogs in particular, the linguistic properties of pronouns and pronominal distributions across different written genres are described. The paper analyzes usage data from a corpus of corporate web logs and develops an explanation of the function of IPPs in specific communicative contexts, especially that of corporate blogs. The evaluation of the results is followed by a concluding discussion of the factors that make pronominal expression highly characteristic of this emerging form of computer-mediated communication (CMC).