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In:From Pragmatics to Dialogue
Edited by Edda Weigand and István Kecskés
[Dialogue Studies 31] 2018
► pp. 137–170

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Dialogicity in written language use

Variation across expert action games

Published online: 5 October 2018
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https://doi.org/10.1075/ds.31.08bon
The chapter looks at dialogicity in written language use, focusing on how expert knowledge is recontextualized in different action games. Using a corpus of journal articles, newspaper columns and blog posts by the same author (Paul Krugman), the analysis centres on: (a) participants (the expert community, the writer and the reader), (b) communicative action and (c) the evaluative dialogue between writer and reader. The study highlights that research action games take scholarly debates as their starting point and involve the expert community, while knowledge dissemination recontextualizes expert argument in a wider participation framework: columns highlight the authority of the writer by presenting a self-contained argument; blogs present the post as the opening move of a polylogue addressing different participants.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background: The dialogicity of academic writing
  • 3.A case study of Paul Krugman
  • 4.Dialogicity in research articles
    • 4.1Focus on Krugman (1991)
    • 4.2Participants-oriented perspective
      • 4.2.1The community
      • 4.2.2Self-reference and reference to the reader
      • 4.2.3Interrogatives and imperatives
    • 4.3Action-oriented perspective
    • 4.4Evaluative dialogue
    • 4.5The journal articles corpus
  • 5.Dialogicity in research and in knowledge dissemination
    • 5.1Comparing research and knowledge dissemination
    • 5.2Focus on columns
    • 5.3Focus on blog posts
  • 6.Concluding remarks
  • Acknowledgment
  • Notes
  • References
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