Abstract
The aim of the article is to identify genre, structural, pragmatic and stylistic features of English travel blogs. Travel blog as a genre is a form of Internet communication that combines elements of different registers; it is marked by its dialogic, interactive and polycode features, that is a combination of verbal and non-verbal components serving informative, appealing and persuasive purposes. The article uses discourse, pragmastylistic and contextual analyses. It is obvious that the genre features of analyzed messages of the travel blog are speech forms combining neutral and colloquial registers. The blog structure is horizontal with themes arranged in line with posts links behind them. The posts themselves have no rigid structure, the mandatory parts are headlines and subheadlines – rubrics and the final part containing either impressions of the trip, advertising a certain destination and sponsor, or appeal to the readers to discuss the contents and persuade them to go to the described places. The main part of the blog can have rubrics (tips or description of sights and their evaluation); it can be the interchange of trip experiences with their evaluation and photos for each of those. The pragmastylistic features of the narrative are the syntactic means serving expressiveness and stimulating interest in the blog content, as well as in future trips: parallel constructions, inversion, parcellation. Lexical means create an atmosphere of real communication and trustworthiness: the use of abbreviated morphological and grammatical forms, words formed by conversion, idioms, interjections; phonetic-graphic means include graphon, emoticons, multiplication, capitalisation to accentuate certain parts of the utterance and convey emotions. The paper concludes that both linguistic and extralinguistic means reflect the key genre features and serve the author’s purpose – to get and keep the readers interested, to persuade them to act. The research material were 113 pragmastylistic language units from 15 posts of an English travel blog, where the author shares with the subscribers her impressions of travelling in Europe, Asia and Latin America. The American blogger and freelance journalist Ciara Jonson was chosen due to her blogs being ranked as one of the best travel blogs by travel editions and other bloggers.
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