Law on the net: the blawg as a popular genre
Abstract
This paper deals with the discursive genres of “blawgs”, namely legal blogs, through an empirical exploratory analysis of the practices and strategies used to represent, construct and communicate legal knowledge (see Preite 2013; Engberg & Luttermann 2014).
The analysis is based on a monolingual corpus of blawgs compiled by collecting the multimodal material extracted from the 15 best Spanish legal blawgs, according to the 2014 Alexa Internet classification and the information provided by the thematic directory of Spanish legal blawgs (J. R. Chaves 2014). The methodological approach falls within the so-called corpus-assisted discourse studies (Baker et al. 2011: 378; Partington et al. 2013: 11-14): the corpus represents the testbed to study the dynamics of asymmetrical communication (expert vs. laypersons) and to identify the most frequent patterns and strategies, from strictly linguistic features (lexical, terminological, phraseological, syntactical and textual) to semiotic and multimodal ones. By combining quantitative and qualitative approaches, the study attempts to discover which the most common rhetorical categories used in blawgs are, as well as the means used to popularise legal knowledge at linguistic, discursive and multimodal levels.
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