Virtual Medical Communication in English. A Corpus-based Analysis of Inclusive we, us and our in the Intercultural Clinical Blog

Abstract

Blogs play a very important role in web-based communication as they represent ever-increasing worldwide tools in both everyday and professional interaction (Crystal 2007; Herring 1996, 2007). Similarly to all writers in general, bloggers use persuasive techniques to attract readers’ attention and make them share their points of views and opinions. The use of inclusive pronouns and possessives fulfils pragmatic persuasive functions. The aim of this work was to investigate how the first-person plural personal pronouns we and us and the first-person plural possessive adjective our were used in an intercultural blog in the medical field, namely Clinical blog, of the British Medical Journal (BMJ). The use of these words revealed itself to function as both the blogger’s expression of a sense of belonging to the same professional community and a persuasive technique to draw their peers’ attention to their statements and opinions. The three words were investigated by means of a concordancing analysis of a corpus of 199 posts published between 2009 and 2011.