Evaluation in English-Medium Medical Book Reviews

Abstract

The aim of this paper is twofold: 1) to identify the evaluative speech acts, either positive or negative, contained in a corpus of 30 English-written medical book reviews published in <em>The British Medical Journal</em> in the period 2000-2009; 2) to analyze the linguistic-rhetorical strategies used to convey this evaluation. Our main results illustrate that various mitigating strategies are used not only to soften criticism, but also to help maintain social harmony and solidarity with the reviewees. Moreover, negative evaluation is on many occasions voiced at aspects outside the book reviewed, which would mean that apart from showing their expertise in the field tackled, book reviewers also want to discuss certain issues of their concern and to put forward their cultural background.

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

“…Therefore, although most instances of evaluative acts were identified on the basis of explicit lexical resources that denoted the reviewers' positive or negative evaluation of the book, decisions about the evaluative force of some other instances depended on the immediately surrounding text (i.e. co-text) and/or the retrospective or prospective contextual metadiscourse labels (Stotesbury 2003;Moreno and Suárez 2008a;Alcaraz-Ariza 2010).…”

“…Book reviews have been the subject of various studies in different contexts during the past three decades. Most of these studies have mainly focused on the generic structure of academic reviews (e.g., Motta-Roth 1998;Nicolaisen 2002;Hartley 2006;Suárez and Moreno 2008) and the evaluative language and evaluation strategies related to praise and criticism (e.g., Belcher 1995;Gea Valor 2000;Hyland 2000;Alcaraz-Ariza 2010). Other studies have explored this genre in non-academic contexts.…”

“…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).…”

Mitigation strategies in examiners’ reports of Mphil theses

“…Several studies have investigated the language of evaluation, focusing on expert writings such as research articles (Hyland, 2005), book reviews (e.g. Alcaraz-Ariza, 2010;Giannoni, 2002), and review reports (e.g. Kosonen, 2014), graduate writing like maters' thesis (e.g.…”

A Cross-disciplinary Study on Evaluative Strategies in Research Articles Conclusion Sections

“…It is posited that academic writing as a 'persuasive endeavor' (Hyland, 2011, p.15) not only produces texts with an external reality, but also uses language to acknowledge, construct, and negotiate social interactions. The centrality of evaluative language has prompted many researchers to investigate its use in different written genres, such as research articles (e.g., Jalilifar, Bardideh & Shooshtari, 2018;Jalilifar, Hayati, & Mashhadi, 2012;Millán, 2014), movie reviews (e.g., Taboada, Carretero, & Hinnell, 2014), book reviews (e.g., Alcaraz-Ariza, 2002), students' argumentative writings (e.g., Liu, 2013;Liu & McCabe, 2018;Liu & Thompson, 2009;Mori, 2017;Myskow & Ono, 2018;Ngo & Unworth, 2015;Wu & Alison, 2003), university lectures (e.g., Bellés-Fortuño, 2017) as well as spoken discourse (e.g., Fernandes, 2011;Llinares, 2015;Põldvere, Matteo, & Carita, 2016), and translation (Munday, 2015), or biography (Su & Hunston, 2019), to name a few. Appraisal framework is advantageous in two major aspects: Initially, it is located at the discourse semantic level of language.…”