Evaluation in academic discourse: Managing criticism in Japanese and English book reviews

Criticism and politeness strategies in academic review discourse: a contrastive (English-Italian) corpus-based analysis

“…The criticisms identified in the sub-corpora were categorised into "direct" and "mitigated", borrowing Itakura andTsui's (2011, 1369) terminology: "mitigated criticisms were negative evaluations accompanied by linguistic devices which serve to minimize facethreatening effects, while direct criticisms were those that were not mitigated." Direct criticisms are not avoided in the corpora, and are in fact an integral feature of the genre, but they are often mitigated in various ways.…”

“…This study attempts to contribute to the area of cross-cultural research on reviewing practices by exploring how criticisms are managed in a somewhat neglected review genre in academic discourse studies -the book review article. Criticisms will be identified on the basis of their lexico-grammatical features and further categorized into "direct" and "mitigated" (Itakura & Tsui 2011, 1369. The mitigation strategies identified in both language corpora mainly involve the use of sequences of speech acts such as praise-criticism, criticism-praise, criticism-suggestion, praise-suggestion, and hedging.…”

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

“…A number of previous studies have examined the dimension of evaluation in academic reviews. Some researchers evaluated the qualities of BRs in different disciplinary cultures (e.g., Hyland 2000), others examined evaluative language in specific disciplinary culture (e.g., Gea Valor 2000-2001Alcaraz-Ariza 2010), some others compared evaluation in BRs at an ethnic cultural level (Salager-Meyer et al 2003;Salager-Meyer and Alcaraz-Ariza 2004;Suárez and Moreno 2008;Moreno and Suárez 2009;Lores-Sanz 2012), whereas others analyzed evaluative language cross-culturally (Itakura and Tsui 2011).…”

“…Hyland (2000) also found that reviewers tend to open English BRs with praise before they offer criticism in the subsequent sections and close these reviews with a positive evaluation in order to repair the adverse effect of criticism and protect the face of the book authors. Another contrastive study was conducted by Itakura and Tsui (2011) to analyze the rhetorical strategies for providing criticism utilized in English and Japanese BRs. The authors found a frequent use of praise in English BRs in order to create solidarity.…”

A Study of Appraisal in Chinese Academic Book Reviews

“…The major purpose of this special genre, usually published in international journals, is to introduce a new book to the general readers in an academic discipline, and at the same time, to "evaluate the scholarly work of a professional peer within the scholarly community" (Lindholm-Romantschuk, 1998, p. 40). From the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistics, the three variables of the context of situation through which the genre of academic book reviews is realized can be briefly described as follows: (1) field: information about the content of the book as well as the reviewer's opinion of the book will be provided; (2) tenor: the reviewer provides information and the readers receive the information, and the reviewer tries to persuade the readers to accept his opinion of the book; (3) mode: formal written language published in academic journals. We should say that the deepest study on academic book reviews was done by Hyland (2004) in his work Disciplinary Discourses: Social Interactions in Academic Writing.…”