Genre Analysis Of English Academic Book Reviews Across Disciplines

Academic book review(BR)is a significant form of academic exchange for researchers in various disciplines.It helps disciplinary members understand the development frontier of the field and provides an effective platform for academic discussion and evaluation.As an important measure of knowledge production and dissemination,BRs play a unique role in the discourse construction of disciplinary knowledge.This makes the genre study of English BRs extremely important.In view of the lack of genre analysis of English BRs in the past,and the lack of comparative research among different disciplines,it is imperative to make a comparative analysis of English BRs from the cross-disciplinary perspective.This paper selects biology in the natural science,pedagogy in the social science and philosophy in the humanities for comparative analysis.English BRs in core journals from 2016 to 2020 are selected as corpus sources,and 20 BRs in each of the three disciplines are randomly selected to establish three corpora respectively.According to the genre analysis theory,this paper analyzes the genre of English BR of the three disciplines in order to describe their macro-generic structure and micro-linguistic characteristics.After exploring the similarities and differences of the same genre among different disciplines and explaining the reasons for these similarities and differences,this paper has revealed the rule of the text construction of English BRs of the three disciplines.The results show that:(1)in terms of macro-generic structure,at the move level,the rhetorical structure of English BRs in the three disciplines is generally composed of four moves,including Move 1(introducing the book),Move 2(outlining the book),Move 3(highlighting parts of the book)and Move 4(providing closing evaluation),through which the communicative purposes of BRs are achieved.But the frequency of moves is quite different across the three disciplines.At the step level,there are significant differences in the frequency of Step 2(informing about potential readership),Step 4(making topic generalizations),Step 5(inserting book in the field),Step 6(providing general view of the organization of the book)and Step 10A(definitely recommending / disqualifying the book)in the three corpora.In addition,in the analysis of move patterns,we find the absence,embedding and circulation of moves,and also found a new move—making initial comments.(2)In terms of micro-linguistic features,the analysis of type-token ratio,voices and tenses also shows the existence of disciplinary variations across the three corpora.First of all,the type-token ratio of biological BRs is higher than that of pedagogy and philosophy,indicating that the sentence patterns and vocabulary of biological BRs are more complex than those of the other two disciplines.Secondly,in the use of voices,biology tends to use passive voice to emphasize the objectivity of facts in BRs,and philosophy is more likely to use active voice to convey the reviewer’s voice and construct their identity.Lastly,as for the tenses,the most commonly used tenses in BRs are the present simple tense,followed by the present perfect tense and the past simple tense.The choice of tenses is not only influenced by disciplines,but also by moves.In general,in terms of macro-generic structure,English BRs of the three disciplines have a similar move structure at the moves level,but there are significant differences in the frequency of moves and steps in the three disciplines.In terms of micro-linguistic features,the sentence patterns and vocabulary diversity of biological BRs are more complex than those of the other two disciplines;The use of voices and tenses in different disciplines has different tendencies,and is closely related to the communicative functions of moves.The above findings show that there are discipline related generic characteristics in English BRs,and the differences of textual patterns are mainly affected by factors such as disciplinary culture,communicative purposes,journal requirements and so on.This study aims to provide practical suggestions for the genre analysis of English BRs,and the teaching of English BR writing in different disciplines.