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This media linguistic study provides a genre history of the personal weblog, using a diachronic corpus (1997-2012). The results on several dimensions (e.g. situation, structure etc.) are used to outline a coherent genre history of the personal weblog in its various relations to different on- and offline genres.

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This book outlines a coherent genre history of the personal weblog from the perspective of media linguistics. An analysis of a diachronic corpus (1997-2012) suggests distinct phases in the history of the genre. In addition to media linguistics, the author draws on methods from textual and corpus linguistics as well as the social sciences. He traces the personal weblog´s various relations to different on- and offline genres and describes the blog communication form as well as the communicative situation, structural features and several posting genres characteristic of personal weblogs. The findings are embedded into theoretical considerations on genre change in general as well as stability and change of web-based genres in particular.

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Contents: Genre dynamics - Genre change - Patterns of genre change - Inivisible Hand theory - A diachronic blog corpus - Blog communication form - Communicative situation - Language and image on personal weblogs - Posting genres and genre profile of the personal weblog - A genre history - Genre migration - Genre split - Pattern embedding.

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" The Personal Weblog: a Linguistic History [...] is an excellent reading on (corpus-based) genre analysis and more specifically on the diachronic analysis of blogs. It is a recommended reading for linguists and computational linguists interested in genre analysis and in the genre-revealing linguistic features."
(Marina Santini, Linguist List Jan. 2017)

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Peter Schildhauer studied gymnasiales Lehramt (German/English) at the universities of Halle-Wittenberg and Newcastle (UK). His research interests lie in the fields of text- and media-linguistics, computer-mediated communication and digital education. He works as a lecturer at the German department of the University of Halle-Wittenberg and is co-founder of the ejournal 10plus1: Living Linguistics.

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