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Language and Dialogue: Online-First Articles

Dialogic markers in Ask an Expert webpages on environmental discourse

 | University of Zaragoza
Scholars and scientists increasingly promote collaboration, accessibility and information sharing through digital media. One such communicative scenario for scientific dissemination is Ask an Expert practices, where specialised knowledge of societal relevance is exchanged between expert and non-expert users. Focusing on the discourse of climate change and environmental sustainability, this paper analyses a corpus of 80 texts from the Ask an Expert webpage of the MIT Climate Portal by looking into dialogic mechanisms shaping the interaction among users. Insights are gained into interactional metadiscourse categories, specifically attitude and engagement markers, which characterise experts’ knowledge construction and scientific dissemination in Ask an Expert texts to cater for the needs and expectations of the general public in the field of environmental sciences.
Keywords: Ask an Expert webpages, digital practices, scientific dissemination, expert communication, dialogicity, attitude markers, engagement markers, climate discourse
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Trends in digital scientific discourse: Expert to non-expert communication
    • 1.2Dialogicity and frameworks for its analysis
  • 2.The digital practice of Ask an Expert webpages
  • 3.Methods
    • 3.1Corpus data
    • 3.2Procedure
  • 4.Results and discussion
    • 4.1Attitude markers
    • 4.2Engagement markers
  • 5.Final considerations
  • References
Published online: 10 January 2025
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https://doi.org/10.1075/ld.00191.pas
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