Member roles and identities in online support groups: Perspectives from corpus and systemic functional linguistics

Abstract

Online support groups (OSGs) are common sources of both health information and social support. To augment existing qualitative understandings of member roles and identities in OSGs, this article presents a corpus-based investigation of shifts in member lexicogrammatical and discourse-semantic choices in a bipolar disorder OSG. In total, 8.4 million words in 57,000 posts were transformed into a structured, grammatically annotated corpus and investigated using systemic functional linguistics (SFL) as a theoretical framework, focusing on interpersonal and experiential meanings. The findings of mood and transitivity analyses show marked differences between new and veteran members’ language choic..