The corporate blog as an emerging genre of computer ... - Oapen

18 Introduction
extent that one interpretation of a phenomenon does not necessarily rule out
another, and when it does that shouldn’t be a deterrent to the proponents of
an alternative explanation.
My error two years ago was in assuming that a purely data-driven approach
to an emerging type of writing would result in a satisfactory analysis. I have
since found two things: firstly, data alone is not enough, and must be complemented
by a concise theory of the object of study which can then be cautiously
tested on different forms of data; a purely data-driven approach is simply not
viable. Secondly, I discovered that the object of study is more elusive than I
had previously thought.
Human language data, in the age of the Internet, comes conveniently packaged
in digital form. This allows the easy application of computational methods,
which has many merits both for applied and theoretical purposes. Much of
what is done in natural language processing (NLP) hinges on solving practical
problems related to data and text mining, search engine technology and similar
issues. While these applications and theoretical issues connect to one another
at many points, they differ profoundly in their objective: applications are successful
if they work, theories are successful if they are considered descriptively
adequate. I came to realize that since the aim of my research was to describe
a text type in terms of its communicative function, no amount of data would
stand in for a model supported by more general, pragmatically informed theories
of communication, and that in turn such a model would not be unequivocally
validated by the evidence no matter how long I looked. Language data comes
with the added caveat that it captures only a minuscule fraction of what is communicated
– it merely allows us to speculate about what the speaker intends
and the listener understands.
Additionally, I found that a linguistic study of blogging, even one based on
a pragmatic model of blog communication can translate into a number of very
different things. A whole range of disciplines, among them both text linguistics
and general (structuralist) linguistics, literary studies, anthropology and cultural
studies, have long postulated a semiotic view of human communication.
While differing significantly in detail, these approaches assume that speakers
encode meaning into communicative signals (signs), which are then decoded by
hearers. Some disciplines (structuralist linguistics, formal semantics) choose to
largely ignore both ends of the process (speaker and hearer) and focus on the nature
of signs and their (assumed) intrinsic meaning. Others take speaker, hearer
and other externalities into consideration. But approaches in literary studies,
text linguistics, stylistics and genre studies have to this date focused either on
the textual product or on the meta-structure that supersedes it (genre). They
have, explicitly or implicitly, postulated that texts have meanings – variable and
shifting meanings, perhaps, but that they are themselves meaningful, and that
therefore the code (if only in context) should be the main object of study.
This view can be challenged by a model that radically shifts the focus from
the object of use to the users. Such a model is based on the principle of inference
and rooted in psychology and the study of human cognition. It aims to discover
what states the mind of the speaker and the mind of the hearer experience in
communication. In its most radical form, such a view renders the nature of
the text itself – the shape it takes, its origins, development and evolution –
insignificant, because texts are merely stimuli produced by writers that trigger
inferential processes in the minds of readers. From this perspective they have