Dialogic relations in scientific articles

a look at the ways of citing other people's discourse

Abstract

This article discusses aspects related to the analysis of the academic writing of scientific articles in different areas of knowledge, with a focus on the manifestations of dialogic relations. The reflection presented is the result of a broader research project, the central aim of which was to understand the role of these relationships in academic writing. To this end, we investigated how citation modes reflect dialogic relations in scientific articles from the three major areas of knowledge - Biological Sciences, Exact Sciences and Humanities. The analysis was based on textual fragments extracted from articles published in three academic journals classified in the A1 stratum of Qualis, in order to represent different forms of resumption, anticipation and interaction with the discourse of others. The theoretical framework adopted is based on the classifications of types and variants of discourse present in the works Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics (2018) and Marxism and Philosophy of Language (2021), both attributed to the Bakhtin Circle. From a methodological point of view, the research articulates the language studies proposed by Volóchinov (2021) with Ginzburg's (1991) indicative paradigm, which allowed us to carry out a detailed qualitative analysis of the forms of citation and their functions within scientific articles. The results reveal the diversity of ways in which dialogic relations are manifested in the articles analyzed, revealing how the writers construct their texts based on dialogue with other discourses, which also allowed us to discern differences in the composition and scope of dialogic relations, by observing how the different forms of citation in scientific articles can be explained in the light of the notions of dialogic relations and types and variants of discourse. These uses of other people's voices - through direct and indirect quotations, paraphrases and other strategies - not only organize the content, but also give legitimacy and argumentative density to scientific writing. The study thus contributes to understanding the discursive mechanisms that underpin the process of writing articles in different areas of knowledge, highlighting the importance of dialogic relationships as a structuring element of academic writing.