Interactions between ideology, dialogic space construction, and the text-organizing function: A comparative study of traditional and postmodern academic writing corpora

Dialogic elements are considered to play a crucial role in text construction, but little has been revealed concerning how these elements interact with other resources to construct text. This paper explores the text-organizing function of heteroglossic resources quantitatively by focusing on different ideological stances that thesis writers take, namely, the traditional or postmodern stance they take toward history writing. In this study, I demonstrate that traditional and postmodern theses vary significantly in the way they create dialogic spaces. The analysis further reveals that the different dialogic strategies they employ are manifested in the larger textual organization, which demonstrates that dialogic resources interact with text-organizing resources in the construction of text. Keywords: dialogism; corpus linguistics; English for Academic Purposes; history discourse; interactions between multiple resources