The Object of Virtual Desire: seducing on the Internet

Abstract

This research seeks to combine the tools of corpus analysis with the specificity of genre analysis and the appraisal system framework to attempt at a categorization of online dating personal profiles as a truly digital subgenre within the genre system of online dating. Such profiles will be regarded as socially dependent communicative events of staged and purposeful social process (Martin, 1985; Bhatia, 1993, Hoey, 2001), of the ostensive kind (Tanaka, 1999), the functional construction of which resembles that of offer/product, promoting incentive and seduction through discourse strategies of self-promotion. The corpus will undergo scrutiny from the perspective of rhetorical moves and conversational tactics that permeate discourse of this promotional genre, in an effort to map out macro-patterns and micro-relations, as well as semantic-lexical, discourse-level resources, inherent to the atypical structural organization of this emerging kind of hypertext.

Key words: promotional genre, rhetorical moves, macro-patterns