Language used in corporate weblogs. An analysis of Starbuck’s weblog

XVIII Jornades de Foment de la Investigació de la Facultat de Ciències Humanes i Socials (Any 2013) ; The aim of this article is to analyze the language used in weblogs, which is one the cybergenres of the Web 2.0 communication that is widely used in many communication contexts, either formal and informal. Some attention has been paid to this cybergenre from the field of discourse analysis (Herring et al. 2005). I will focus my attention on the study of the specific language used in one type of weblogs, namely, corporate weblogs. These blogs are published by or with the support of an organization to reach that organization's goals (Fredrik, 2004). I selected one well-known corporate weblog as the object of the present study, that is, the Starbucks’ blog. The focus of my study is to analyze the language used in this blog in order to know to what extent formality features are used and how they shape the discourse type employed in these blogs. The variables taking into account for the study are: first, formality features (i.e., formal or informal language) found in the entry and comments that will be analyzed and, second, discourse features (i.e., written or spoken discourse) found in the weblog that will be analyzed. The main results of this study show 1) the informal language used in corporate weblogs, and 2) the hybrid nature (i.e., a mixture between written and spoken language) of blogs concerning the language employed in them (Ruiz-Garrido and Ruiz-Madrid, 2007). These results are discussed and suggestions for further research are given.