“And, Worst of All, Habeus was Corpsed”: Language Play Using a Passive Voice Frame on the Daily Kos Weblog
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Abstract
This article examines a bounded episode of language play in one member diary posted to a well-known political weblog. The diarist-member employed a passive voice frame to make short, pointed remarks about the current state of American politics as well as about member behavior on the blog. The 863 comments these remarks elicited are classified and analyzed to describe the ways commenters fit their contributions into this grammatical frame to conform to the model the original diarist implicitly set out. The findings show that commenters were adept at manipulating existing lexical forms and crafting new words and phrases to fashion mock passives that enriched the playfulness of the interaction. In so doing, commenters played with language not just for amusement, but to create solidarity within the community of bloggers by using insider language and alluding to familiar topics of talk.
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