Formality and contextuality in blogs: A linguistic analysis

Abstract

The aim of this study is to investigate formality and contextuality in weblogs. It investigates the main formality and contextuality features principally focusing on the F-score proposed by Heylighen and Dewale (1999). The primary material comes from the online blog directory Technorati and from Blogeries.com. The method was a corpus analysis using the concordance software Wordsmith in order to carry out a linguistic analysis of the data. The main findings confirm previous findings that blogs are mainly separated into thematic and Personal blogs. In addition, the more focused the author on imparting information, the higher the F-score and consequently the lower the contextuality of the text. Authors who focused on their personal lives produced more contextual texts with lower F-scores. The study suggests that whilst the F-score is a good indicator of formality, it should not be considered an absolute indication of formality in the traditional sense, rather it should be seen as an indication of a text’s contextuality and be used as a basis from which further investigation can be developed.