doi: 10.18178/IJLLL.2024.10.2.504
Online Support Community Building: An Interpersonal Pragmatic Study of Medical Sharing Discourse
Meiqi Wang
- Shanghai International Studies University, Shanghai, China
- Manuscript received December 14, 2023
- revised January 3, 2024
- accepted January 30, 2024
- published March 26, 2024
Abstract
The online support community is composed ofnetizens who have experienced shared stressful events ordiseases. Few studies have focused on the mechanism of onlinecommunity maintenance and construction. New rapportmanagement model, as the frontier theory of interpersonalpragmatics, can avoid the limited coverage of linguistic evidencein sociological or communication approach. Medical sharingdiscourse is the true-life recording of personal medicalexperience in online community. As a new type of healthdiscourse, it has become the main source for Chinese people toattain medical information. With complex interactive roles andspecial interpersonal contexts, it can best reflect interlocutors’awareness of community building. Based on new rapportmanagement model, this study focuses on the medical sharingdiscourse in China’s biggest online community Red Booklet.The discourse model and its interpersonal function incommunity maintenance will be elaborated in detail. Resultsshow that bloggers have specific language selection in fivelanguage domains. Bloggers’ proper manipulation of interests,emotion, face, rights and obligations and communicativeobjectives in interaction contributes to the construction ofonline community.
Keywords
- health discourse
- interpersonal pragmatics
- online support community
- rapport management
How to Cite
Meiqi Wang, "Online Support Community Building: An Interpersonal Pragmatic Study of Medical Sharing Discourse," International Journal of Languages, Literature and Linguistics, vol. 10, no. 2, pp. 155-160, 2024. https://doi.org/10.18178/IJLLL.2024.10.2.504
Copyright & License
Copyright © 2024 by the authors. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited (CC BY 4.0).