The emergence of the identity of a fictional expert advice-giver in an American Internet advice column
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Miriam A Locher
Miriam A. Locher is Senior Assistant of English linguistics at the University of Berne. Her work has been in the field of linguistic politeness and the exercise of power in oral communication. She currently works on advice in Internet advice columns. Her latest publications are
Power and Politeness in Action: Disagreements in Oral Communication (Mouton de Gruyter, 2004) and ‘Politeness theory and relational work’ (Journal of Politeness Research , 2005, together with R. J. Watts).
and
Sebastian Hoffmann
Sebastian Homann is a Lecturer at the University of Zurich. His research focuses on syntactic change, aspects of fixedness (e.g., collocations) and the interplay between corpus data and language theory. A second major area of his research is corpus linguistic methodology. His latest publication is entitled
Grammaticalization and English Complex Prepositions . ACorpus-Based Study (Routledge, 2005).
Abstract
This paper is a contribution to research on the expression of expert advice-giving (e.g., Heritage and Sefi 1992; Silverman et al. 1992). We present a linguistic analysis of the ways in which the identity of the fictional expert advisor Lucy emerges in an Internet advice column run by professional health educators as part of a university health service. In discourse-analytical close readings of 280 question–answer records, we identify and discuss seven recurring strategies (the advisor's name, self-reference and use of address terms; expert information-giving; giving options and making readers think; the choice of vocabulary; offering opinions; the use of empathy; the display of humor), which together contribute to Lucy's voice as an expert advice-giver if the readers repeatedly access the question–answer exchanges. This emerging identity is in line with the site's mission to provide information designed to facilitate independent and responsible decision processes and corresponds to an ideal of nondirectiveness, as also identified in the literature on other advisory settings (He 1994; Sarangi and Clarke 2002; Vehviläinen 2003). The constructed identity of Lucy thus makes ‘Lucy Answers’ an attractive site to (re)turn to for advice and complements the other services provided by the health educators.
About the authors
Miriam A. Locher is Senior Assistant of English linguistics at the University of Berne. Her work has been in the field of linguistic politeness and the exercise of power in oral communication. She currently works on advice in Internet advice columns. Her latest publications are Power and Politeness in Action: Disagreements in Oral Communication (Mouton de Gruyter, 2004) and ‘Politeness theory and relational work’ (Journal of Politeness Research, 2005, together with R. J. Watts).
Sebastian Homann is a Lecturer at the University of Zurich. His research focuses on syntactic change, aspects of fixedness (e.g., collocations) and the interplay between corpus data and language theory. A second major area of his research is corpus linguistic methodology. His latest publication is entitled Grammaticalization and English Complex Prepositions. A Corpus-Based Study (Routledge, 2005).
© Walter de Gruyter
Articles in the same Issue
- Post-Text
- Who are we and who are you? The strategic use of forms of address in political interviews
- Toward a more valid account of functional text quality: The case of the patient information leaflet
- The emergence of the identity of a fictional expert advice-giver in an American Internet advice column
- Food and behavior: A Burkean motive analysis of a quasi-medical text
Articles in the same Issue
- Post-Text
- Who are we and who are you? The strategic use of forms of address in political interviews
- Toward a more valid account of functional text quality: The case of the patient information leaflet
- The emergence of the identity of a fictional expert advice-giver in an American Internet advice column
- Food and behavior: A Burkean motive analysis of a quasi-medical text
