Positioning the Self in Blog Posts

A Corpus-based Investigation of Food Blogs in English

Abstract

Positioning Theory (PT) first emerged in the 1980s in psychology studies to investigate how people occupy and negotiate their place—both physical and social—while interacting with other people. Research in this area has also considered the linguistic and discursive practices that position interlocutors in any form of communication and interaction, affecting in turn the reciprocal perception of ‘the other.’ This mutual positioning eventually shapes—and is shaped—by discourse in any kind of communicative context. Positioning, then, becomes crucial in digital communication, in which boundaries and perceptions of the ‘self’ and the ‘other’ are in a way distorted by the absence of a physical space that is replaced by a virtual environment. Considering these premises, this study investigates self-positioning strategies in a corpus of food blogs in English. Particular attention is paid to the ways in which the food bloggers employ pronouns to position themselves in the blog posts in order to establish a rapport with their audience, thus creating a peculiar communicative space. Corpus-based methods of investigation are used to explore the corpus, while PT is used to contextualize and interpret corpus data. Results show that the food bloggers in the corpus use pronouns as indexicals that refer to the bloggers’ specific position in the communicative environment to remark their ‘otherness’ with respect to their audience as well as towards specific socio-cultural contexts. In particular, the food bloggers systematically distance themselves both from the community of users following the food blog and from external elements such as brands, institutions, and other cultures’ culinary traditions.