Coherence and Cohesion in English Discourse

CHAPTER TWO
Cross-cultural variation in the degree of dialogicality 
in research articles:
On some text-organizing devices
Renata Povolná
Abstract
In the ongoing process of increasing internationalization of all scholarship and with regard 
to the crucial role of English as the lingua franca of academia it has become indispensable 
to negotiate preferred degrees of dialogicality of academic texts written in English across 
different fields, cultures and intellectual traditions.
This chapter aims to discover whether there is cross-cultural variation in the use of certain 
text-organizing devices (mostly labelled discourse markers) in academic texts since it 
is assumed that these text organizers, in particular some of their semantic classes, can 
enhance the interaction between the author(s) of the text and the prospective reader(s) 
and thus foster the dialogic character of academic written discourse. Accordingly, the 
analysis is based on two specialized corpora of research articles, one representing Anglo-
American academic texts written by experienced native speakers of English and the other 
representing Central European academic texts produced by non-native speakers of English 
from one discourse community in Central Europe – the Czech Republic.