Dialogicity in Written Language Use: Variation across expert action games

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.