Online Support Community Building: An Interpersonal Pragmatic Study of Medical Sharing Discourse

Abstract

The online support community is composed of netizens who have experienced shared stressful events or diseases. Few studies have focused on the mechanism of online community maintenance and construction. New rapport management model, as the frontier theory of interpersonal pragmatics, can avoid the limited coverage of linguistic evidence in sociological or communication approach. Medical sharing discourse is the true-life recording of personal medical experience in online community. As a new type of health discourse, it has become the main source for Chinese people to attain medical information. With complex interactive roles and special interpersonal contexts, it can best reflect interlocutors’ awareness of community building. Based on new rapport management model, this study focuses on the medical sharing discourse in China’s biggest online community Red Booklet. The discourse model and its interpersonal function in community maintenance will be elaborated in detail. Results show that bloggers have specific language selection in five language domains. Bloggers’ proper manipulation of interests, emotion, face, rights and obligations and communicative objectives in interaction contributes to the construction of online community.