الفهرس 
A comparative genre-based corpus analysis of the discourse of arabic and english weight-loss narratives on facebook
ABSTRACTOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
 |  | from | 201 |  |  |
| | | from | 201 | | |
Abstract
The rise of social media has provided new affordances as well as significance to personal narratives. Weight-loss narratives are no exception. A number of Facebook online communities have been created to bring together members interested in losing weight and adopting a healthy lifestyle. These groups provided a space for the emergence of weight-loss narratives in which narrators share with fellow community members their experience with leading a healthy lifestyle and losing excess weight. The global nature of both obesity disease and social media platforms allowed for the emergence of such narratives in different languages and across a variety of communities. The present study aims at analyzing and comparing the discourse of online weight-loss narratives written in English and Arabic via corpus analysis tools and genre discourse analysis. To that end, a corpus of 200 weight-loss narratives, 100 in English and 100 Arabic were collected and analyzed. The results revealed a tendency among narrators in both corpora to internalize fat-shaming discourses from surrounding community members. The results also highlighted interesting linguistic findings pertaining to the use of English vocabulary in the Arabic narratives and language creativity in the English ones. The findings of the genre analysis show similarities in the overall move structure of both narrative corpora in that they follow a linear sequence in representing the phases of the weight-loss experience as narrators write about their journeys before, during, and after weight-loss