A genre-pragmatic analysis of Arabic academic book reviews (ArBRs)

Abstract

This study aims to investigate the rhetorical genre components and the pragmatic evaluation options used to articulate the communicative function of ArBR genre, and find out how these generic and evaluation options contrast with those reported in other languages and cultures. To this end, a corpus of 50 book reviews written by 50 Arab reviewers was collected and analyzed within the rhetorical components developed and applied by Motta-Roth (1998) to English book reviews. The present study drew on Hyland (2000), Gea Valor (2000-2001), Moreno and Suárez (2008a) and Alcaraz-Ariza (2010) in order to examine how the qualities of ArBRs are evaluated and in which terms (i.e., criticism or praise). The results indicated that the Arab reviewers employed additional sub-moves that have not been used by other researchers. Unlike English book reviewers, Arab reviewers try to avoid criticism. Instead, they usually devote most of their book reviews to describe and summarize uncritically although critical appraisal is supposed to be the backbone of this genre. These purposive generic component preferences and evaluation tendencies can be explained with reference to the goal of the academic community and the writing culture that constrain Arab reviewers' academic behavior. I hope that the results of this study will provide graduate students and novice researchers with further awareness of the acceptable generic strategies, the linguistic choices and pragmatic evaluative options that can be used to write an evaluation of a piece of research.