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Drawing on previous work on reader comments as an aboutness indicator (Kehoe and Gee 2012), this paper focuses on the initial position in comments on blog posts. The aim is, on the one hand, to discover how the actual comment text is introduced and which specific parts of speech appear in initial position. On the other hand, this paper will study the way in which constructions establish interactional and cohesive links to the preceding blog post or previous comments. That is to say that the introductory signals will be analysed for the occurrence of anaphoric references (e.g. “That is so completely clever!!!”), direct addresses to a user (e.g. “Hi Annette,...”), or the attestation of speech related interactional features (e.g. aww, woohoo, oooh), and their functions and distribution in different types of blogs. This will allow new insight to be gained into the creation of cohesive relations between posts and comments and into the interaction between users in the increasingly widespread medium of blogs, which - far from being restricted to the diary domain anymore - has also found widespread use in professional contexts.
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