A Genre-Based Study Of Chinese Book Reviews In Academic Linguistics Journals

The present thesis, a genre-based analysis of Chinese book reviews in academic linguistics journals, seeks to contribute to the ongoing research into academic discourse and the teaching of book reviews in English and in Chinese.The corpus of the present study consists of 50 academic book reviews chosen from five Chinese linguistics journals, with 10 of them from each journal. The samples are examined at both a macro and a micro level. The macro-structural analysis is based on Swales's (1990) Move-step model, while drawing insights from Motta-Roth's (1995b) schema theory and Nicolaisen's (2002a) move model. At the micro-level, this study follows the evaluative categories proposed by Hyland (2001) to investigate the rhetoric features of evaluation in Chinese academic book reviews.Results show that Chinese reviewers prefer the move patterns 1-3-4 and 1-2-3-4, with the former being the dominant pattern (48%), and that Chinese book reviews seem to be more evaluative, since the evaluative moves and steps, such as Step 1.9 (offering first evaluation of the book) and Move4 (providing closing evaluation of the book) are frequently used. At the micro-level, Chinese book reviews seem more praiseful (87.5%) than critical (12.5%). The research indicates that while cross-cultural differences are found in the genre of book reviews, cross-disciplinary variations have also been detected.