The Blog is Served: Crossing the ‘Expert/Non-Expert’ Border in a Corpus of Food Blogs

The present study investigates some of the most popular food blogs (FBs) in the United Kingdom. The aim is to examine this particular genre of computer-mediated communication and, in particular, to individuate the features that characterise its discourse, in which language seems to constantly cross the border between professional and popular terminology. Through corpus-based research methods, the lexico-grammatical aspects of the FBs are analysed to see when and to what extent the food bloggers make use of a more professional language and when and to what extent they employ a more popular(ised) level of discourse. The paper provides evidence that the food bloggers constantly cross the border between the role as experts and the role as food lovers to avoid a lecturing style that would make the FB less attractive to the average user.