A Comparative Study of Dialogistic Language Employed by English and Persian Authors in Textual Production

Academic writing is typically encoded by relatively negotiable and arguable resources indicating the potentially dialogistic nature of its discourse community. Thus, this study is conducted to explore and explain the strategies which are applied by writers to expand or contract the dialogistic voices of written texts. To this end, four texts of applied linguistics writers, two Persian and two English, were selected and then analyzed on the proposed model of Appraisal by Martin and White (2005), particularly the one which is bout Engagement. Results showed that this dialogistic positioning, i.e., engagement, is relatively equally favored by both English and Persian applied linguists which indicate that both English and Persian writers are inclined to establish and maintain writer/reader interactional relationship, make allowance for other voices, as well as observe collegial deference. In respect to the subcategories of engagement, the result showed that in both English and Persian text books writers show a marked difference for coding engagement as Entertain than other subcategories. The reason comes from the fact that by utilizing instances of Entertain the author indicate its position is but one of possible positions, so makes dialogic space for any other possibilities.