Cross-cultural specifics of citing as a means of dialogic space expansion in academic discourse

Citing in academic discourse is a predictable activity aimed at explaining, informing, persuading and constructing a dialogue with the reader and disciplinary community. Citing is typically understood as the process of integrating someone else’s words into a new text. As a result, this text is enriched with new meanings. It has been established that depending on whether the source of citation is foregrounded or obscured, the space for establishing a dialogue might be either expanded or constricted. The aim of this paper is to identify the specifics of citing in international and Russian academic articles with a special focus on the ability of the quote to open up or narrow down the dialogic space. The research corpus includes 10 academic articles in Russian published in Russian journals and 10 academic articles in English found in international periodicals. The methods of contextual analysis, observation, classification, interpretation, and quantitative analysis were used during the study. The research corpus was compiled with the help of the purposive sampling. As a result, it was discovered that authors of academic articles published in international journals use citation more often than those authors who published their research in Russian-language journals. The citation that zooms on faceless words and not its human dimension is more often used in the English-language journals. This allows the author to boost the factuality of the research and thus construct the discourse that is objective, at the same time constricting the dialogic space for arguing and clarification. Citations foregrounding the human dimension prevail in the academic articles in Russian. This type of citation allows the author to create the atmosphere of discussion among the members of the academic community. The results of the research help us to better understand the process of citation, which, as it has turned out, is connected with cultural traditions of academic writing and might require switching to international citing expectations.