Variation Among Blogs: A Multi-dimensional Analysis

Abstract

This paper uses multi-dimensional analysis to investigate functional linguistic variation in internet blogs, with the goal of identifying text types that are distinguished linguistically. A 2 million word corpus of blogs written in American English, sampled across a wide range of topics, is analyzed for this purpose. The corpus is tagged for grammatical information and a factor analysis is carried out to identify the major linguistic patterns of co-occurrence across this corpus. The resultant factors are interpreted as underlying dimensions of functional linguistic variation. The dimensions are subsequently used as predictors in a cluster analysis, which identifies the text types that are linguistically well-defined in this domain of use. These texts types are interpreted functionally by reference to the typical thematic domains and communicative purposes of the blogs grouped into each type. Two main sub- types of blogs are identified: personal blogs and thematic blogs.