Speech acts in travel blogs: users’ corpus-driven pragmatic intentions and discursive realisations.

Abstract

Travel blogs epitomise an informal, digital environment where international users engage in dialogical interactions about their travelling experiences. While doing so, they deploy a range of pragmatic intentions to exchange information and build discussion. Speech acts (Searle, 1975) encapsulate those intentions, and are generally assumed to differ in their illocutionary force depending on users’ communicative needs, and on whether hosted in posts or in comments. This paper explores the frequency and saliency of speech acts in travel blogs, by undertaking a contrastive study as regards generic features in an exploratory corpus of 18 Englishmediated travel blog posts and 367 travel blog comments. The three circles of English (Bolton & Kachru, 2006) are used to balance bloggers’ sociolinguistic background and represent native and nonnative speakers. A corpus-driven typology of speech acts for the travel blog is designed, since aprioristic, traditional classifications may not match users’ intentions in asynchronous, globalised, computer-mediated settings. Connections of particular speech acts with each of the generic instances, whether posts or comments, are revealed, and prototypical discursive realisations of those speech acts are qualitatively provided. The study unveils bloggers’ communicative practices and yields pragmatic and discursive resources users can handle to encode their pragmatic intentions in travel blog posts and comments.