First person pronouns in online diary writing

It is well-known that first person pronouns have a particularly important role to play in conversation. "Online diary" style of writing is less well understood and the role of first person pronouns in that style invites further study. In this chapter the authors explore these pronouns in UK and US online diaries, paying particular attention to frequency and collocational relations. In previous corpus-based studies of English genres, first person pronouns have tended to be considered as one larger set without differentiation. The authors find, on the contrary, that the differences between these forms can be very revealing in the way they distinguish online diary style of writing from other genres such as conversation and fiction writing. The findings underline the need to respect inflectional variants of lemmas as objects of study in their own right.