Manuscript received December 14, 2023; revised January 3, 2024; accepted January 30, 2024; published March 26, 2024
Abstract—The online support community is composed of
netizens who have experienced shared stressful events or
diseases. Few studies have focused on the mechanism of online
community maintenance and construction. New rapport
management model, as the frontier theory of interpersonal
pragmatics, can avoid the limited coverage of linguistic evidence
in sociological or communication approach. Medical sharing
discourse is the true-life recording of personal medical
experience in online community. As a new type of health
discourse, it has become the main source for Chinese people to
attain medical information. With complex interactive roles and
special interpersonal contexts, it can best reflect interlocutors’
awareness of community building. Based on new rapport
management model, this study focuses on the medical sharing
discourse in China’s biggest online community Red Booklet.
The discourse model and its interpersonal function in
community maintenance will be elaborated in detail. Results
show that bloggers have specific language selection in five
language domains. Bloggers’ proper manipulation of interests,
emotion, face, rights and obligations and communicative
objectives in interaction contributes to the construction of
online community.
Keywords—health discourse, interpersonal pragmatics,
online support community, rapport management
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Cite:Meiqi Wang, "Online Support Community Building: An Interpersonal Pragmatic Study of Medical Sharing Discourse," International Journal of Languages, Literature and Linguistics vol. 10, no. 2, pp. 155-160, 2024.