Pieturzīmes emuāros

Abstract

On the internet, people can reach an audience in the way they want, for example, through social media. A blog is a website, often updated daily, in which users write about their thoughts or experiences relating to a subject. Nowadays, blogs have various functions: informational, entertaining, and communicative. Blogs can include texts, photos, videos, and links to other blogs. Writing a blog is subordinate to its audience. Readers ask questions on various issues in the comments. Punctuation marks are used to express emotions and attitudes in the text. The aim is to examine the use of punctuation marks – exclamation marks, question marks, ellipsis, dashes, and double quotation marks – in Latvian authors’ blogs. The empirical base of the study consists of about 500 units of broad syntactic constructions, which have been extracted manually and from the “Latvian Language Blog Corpus”. 27 personal, one woman + man blog, and five cooperative blogs have been examined. Attention is paid to punctuation marks used in blogs and commentaries of blogs in various syntactic constructions, e.g., utterances and parenthesis. The study uses descriptive, comparative, and quantitative research methods. A quantitative analysis of the blog entries shows that expressive use of graphical means is more frequent in personal blogs. Bloggers use emoticons in personal and cooperative blogs.