Discursive Construction Of Dialogie Space In English Academic Discourse

Academic discourse is now generally seen as a purposeful interaction between writers and readers in which the writers try to construct a coherent and credible representation of themselves and their research and to build up a relationship with their putative readers by creating a dialogic space for negotiation and evaluation of their views. Since in written discourse there is no direct contact between writers and readers, the creation of a dialogic space for the negotiation of meaning is dependent on the ability of academic writers to anticipate the possible reactions of readers and to use various discourse strategies in order to persuade the readers to accept their claims and viewpoints, while guiding them towards an intended, coherent interpretation of the text.This research explores the discursive construction of dialogic space in English academic discourse by focusing on some specific linguistic choices evident in the texts. It adopts both quantitative and qualitative approaches and constructs a corpus of180English papers in the fields of linguistics and education. The text of these papers was converted into an electronic corpus with six subcorpora-each representing one academic journal,thus the overall size of the material under investigation is approximately1,424,632words. The instruments that are used in the quantitative and qualitative analysis of these texts are WordSmith Tools5.0and Antconc3.4.By analyzing the use of dialogic resources in the corpus, this investigation has got the following findings:1. Among the various Engagement resources, attribution, concession and negation are more frequently employed by the writers of the English academic discourse. These resources collectively contribute to the discoursal construction of dialogic space, with the first one opening up dialogic space while the next two narrowing or closing it down.2. Some of the typical patterns of attribution, concession and negation are employed by the writers to construct dialogic space in their academic discourse. They are in fact the linguistic patterns of dialogic space.3. The research shows that there are sometimes problems and possibilities which emerge in the investigation of the construction of dialogic space in academic discourse. One of the problems is that the boundaries between the different dimensions of triangulation are occasionally obscure, thus resulting in the difficulty of interpretation. Another problem is that some important content may pass without comment due to the limited scope of this research.The study has yielded some practical implications. By analyzing the construction of dialogic space in academic discourse, the study offers some guidance on both the writing of and the reading of English academic discourse. Since different patterns have different functions, the writer has to be concerned about the selection of the appropriate patterns to adopt a stance, while the reader has to be familiar with these patterns in order to easily identify the stance the writer takes.The study focuses on the exploration of dialogic space in academic discourse within the framework of APPRAISAL. It is expected to reveal that dialogic space can be studied form different perspectives.