Den virtuella kroppen : Presentationer av jaget i svenska dagboksbloggar

The virtual body: the self and the body in Swedish diary blogs There are no bodies on the internet and yet, there are bodies on the internet. This article deals with representations of the ‘virtually physical’ in personal weblogs. To examine the data drawn from 14 weblogs, a qualitative content analysis is made. The results show that the virtual body is widely present in these particular internet settings and that it is most commonly described as female. Moreover, the virtual body is to a large extent a fragmented body that one either takes control over or is controlled by.

Topic- and mode-sensitive interaction strategies : Functions of ellipsis in oral communication

In this article, we discuss ellipsis as an interactive strategy by analysing the author’s textchat corpus and the VOICE corpus of English as a Lingua Franca. It is found that there were fewer repetitions in the textchat data, and this is explained as a consequence of the textchat mode. Textchat contributions are preserved as long as the chat is active or has been saved, and therefore users can scroll through and review the discussion, compared to the more fleeting nature of oral conversation. As a result, repetition is less necessary. The frequency of other functions identified could be attributed to the topic of discourse. Discussions involve much ellipsis used to develop discourse, although some were self-presentations with repetition used to confirm details. Back-channel support and comments were often low because speakers instead used forms like yeah as supportive utterances.