Connected Parents: Combining Online and Off-Line Parenthood in Vlogs and Blogs

Abstract

This article explores evaluative discourse in a corpus sample of parents’ vlogs (video blogs) and blogs (henceforth v/ blogs) dealing with family tasks and responsibilities, as a reflection of underlying values concerning parenthood. It pays special attention to the important role played by the expression of attitude, understood as “ways of feeling” and including the meanings of affect, judgment and appreciation, together with positive politeness in the social practices of the discursive construction of online and off-line parenthood. Analysis and description of the data show two main patterns in parents’ practices, either aiming at perfection through juggling and multi-tasking or building resistance to the demands of families and society. Results show that parents frequently exploit the system of affect for building positive face and rapport, while indirectly expressing judgment of social esteem and social sanction, which construct their identities as mothers and fathers and those of the members of their communities of practice. The corpus for the study consists of a random sample of 400 evaluative units in posts and comments on v/ blogs dealing with family tasks and responsibilities (200 in English and 200 in Spanish, with half the sample being drawn from fathers’ and the other half from mothers’ v/ blogs). I will approach the analysis of the data from appraisal (Martin JR, White PRR, The language of evaluation. Appraisal in English. Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2005; Bednarek M, Emotion talk across corpora. Palgrave Macmillan, Houndmills/New York, 2008) and politeness theory (Brown P, Levinson S, Politeness: Some universals in language usage. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1987) in order to explore the features of evaluative discourse and the management of face. The methodology for processing the data borrows quantitative techniques from Corpus Linguistics, involving coding and statistical treatment of the sample with UAM Corpus Tools (O’Donnell M, UAM Corpus Tool 3.2. UAM, Madrid, 2011), together with Pragmatics and Discourse Analysis (DA), as done in some previous research (Santamaria-Garcia C, Int J Corpus Linguistics, 16(3):346–371, 2011, Santamaria-Garcia C, Evaluative discourse and politeness in university students’ communication through social networking sites. In: Thompson G, Alba-Juez L (eds) Evaluation in context John Benjamins, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, pp 387–411, 2014).