Abstract
Internet group buying has gained unprecedented popularity worldwide in a handful of years, yet little scholarly work has been done on this increasingly important sales and marketing channel. Specifically, no discourse-related studies thus far have examined the generic characteristics of Internet group buying deals. Through the examination of the 100 most popular Internet group buying deals from the top 10 group buying websites targeting mainly the market in Hong Kong, the present study investigates the rhetorical structure of Internet group buying deals by means of a corpus-based multimodal move analysis. This novel approach integrating corpus techniques and multimodal dimensions into the study of move structure identifies 13 move types in the genre and reveals how Internet group buying deals are rhetorically organized through the interplay between the mixing of interdiscursive elements, the use of hypertextual links and the selection of multimodal resources. The dynamic interactions revealed by the present study not only further our understanding of a previously unexamined yet discursively complex genre, but also contribute to theory and methodology development in genre analysis in the digital age.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 13-39 |
| Number of pages | 27 |
| Journal | Journal of Pragmatics |
| Volume | 51 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 1 May 2013 |
| Externally published | Yes |
Keywords
- Corpus-based studies
- Genre
- Hypertextuality
- Interdiscursivity
- Move analysis
- Multimodality
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Language and Linguistics
- Linguistics and Language
- Artificial Intelligence