<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">

<p>The commentary as a journalistic genre that presents and comments on current events is characterized by intersubjective positioning, whereby the author constructs meaning, seeking alignment or, on the contrary, expressing disalignment with a putative audience. In line with the appraisal theory as developed by Martin and White (2005), which follows the Bakhtian dialogic perspective, according to which utterances and propositions are intersubjectively charged, the paper aims to describe the linguistic means of <italic>engagement</italic>, one of the central elements of this theory. Engagement is concerned with how the author expresses authorial voice and how s/he negotiates meaning with the readers, opening up (dialogic expansion) or, on the contrary, closing the dialogic space (dialogic contraction). In this sense, the linguistic means of engagement, such as modality, hedging and boosting devices, evidentiality, are understood to transcend the functions attributed to them within a truth-conditional framework, namely epistemic status and reliability of knowledge, and are seen as means by which the author entertains or rejects alternative voices and opinions. Taking this into consideration, the paper intends to analyse a few selected commentaries on the war situation in Ukraine found on the online platform of The Rand Corporation, a global policy think tank that performs research and conducts evaluations of various topics. It analyses the linguistic means of dialogic positioning, focusing on how the authors negotiate the dialogic space with the audience; while presumably all forms of intersubjective positioning can be found in the texts, it is expected that certain forms of engagement will outnumber others. As all commentaries can be found on the website of the above mentioned corporation, the question also arises as to what extent commentaries show similarity with respect to engagement, thereby expressing, albeit indirectly, a certain standpoint with respect to the Ukrainian warfare.</p>
</abstract>

The commentary as a journalistic genre that presents and comments on current events is characterized by intersubjective positioning, whereby the author constructs meaning, seeking alignment or, on the contrary, expressing disalignment with a putative audience. In line with the appraisal theory as developed by Martin and White (2005), which follows the Bakhtian dialogic perspective, according to which utterances and propositions are intersubjectively charged, the paper aims to describe the linguistic means of engagement, one of the central elements of this theory. Engagement is concerned with how the author expresses authorial voice and how s/he negotiates meaning with the readers, opening up (dialogic expansion) or, on the contrary, closing the dialogic space (dialogic contraction). In this sense, the linguistic means of engagement, such as modality, hedging and boosting devices, evidentiality, are understood to transcend the functions attributed to them within a truth-conditional framework, namely epistemic status and reliability of knowledge, and are seen as means by which the author entertains or rejects alternative voices and opinions. Taking this into consideration, the paper intends to analyse a few selected commentaries on the war situation in Ukraine found on the online platform of The Rand Corporation, a global policy think tank that performs research and conducts evaluations of various topics. It analyses the linguistic means of dialogic positioning, focusing on how the authors negotiate the dialogic space with the audience; while presumably all forms of intersubjective positioning can be found in the texts, it is expected that certain forms of engagement will outnumber others. As all commentaries can be found on the website of the above mentioned corporation, the question also arises as to what extent commentaries show similarity with respect to engagement, thereby expressing, albeit indirectly, a certain standpoint with respect to the Ukrainian warfare.

An Analysis of Dialogic Positioning in Online Commentaries

Sapientia Hungarian University of Transylvania

Department of Human Sciences, Miercurea Ciuc

Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Philologica

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License.

{"article-title":"An Analysis of Dialogic Positioning in Online Commentaries"}

The commentary as a journalistic genre that presents and comments on current events is characterized by intersubjective positioning, whereby the author...

An Analysis of Dialogic Positioning in Online Commentaries

Published Online: Nov 27, 2023

Page range: 153 - 165

DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/ausp-2023-0022

Keywords
commentary, engagement, dialogic positioning, corpus

© 2023 Tünde Nagy, published by Sciendo

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License.

An Analysis of Dialogic Positioning in Online Commentaries

Published Online: Nov 27, 2023

Page range: 153 - 165

DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/ausp-2023-0022

Keywordscommentary, engagement, dialogic positioning, corpus

© 2023 Tünde Nagy, published by Sciendo

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License.

Keywords
commentary, engagement, dialogic positioning, corpus