Attitudinal Meanings In English Academic Book Reviews

Academic discourse study has attracted much attention both at home and abroad since the 1970s.However,book review(henceforth BR),the sub-genre of academic discourse has remained neglected.This study emphasizes that BR is not only an important vehicle for the scholar to transform academic information,to express agreements to some academic theories and exchange academic achievements,but also an evaluation about a book on its academic quality and value and a comment about a book on its contents.Based on this belief,this thesis offers a tentative study to explore the nature and features of this genre.Data resources employed in this research are from two leading linguistic journals-Journal of Pragmatics and Linguistics and Education.30 BRs(about 50 thousand words) are chosen to analyze how the evaluative strategies are realized by attitudinal meanings and how attitudinal meanings are realized by linguistic forms.Both quantitative and qualitative approaches are employed to make a statistical analysis of the frequency distributions of attitudinal resources in English academic BRs and relevant and reasonable explanations are to be given.Some research findings have been made in this research.First,English academic BRs are embedded with Modality,especially Metaphors of Modality which are fulfilling the generic demand of being objective in BRs.Second,English academic BRs are found to contain a large amount of attitudinal resources.The distributions of all subsystems of Attitude are not well-proportioned.Among the three attitudes,attitudinal meaning of Appreciation(63.5%)is overtly foregrounded.The analysis of Attitude indicates a strong preference across English academic BRs over Attitude expressed as Appreciation rather than Affect and judgment.Third,most of the attitudinal meanings towards the content of the reviewed books are realized by Appreciation.The canonical grammatical realization of Appreciation is adjectives and "useful" is the most frequently used adjectival Appreciation in English academic BRs in this research.Within the sub-systems of Appreciation,Value and Composition which occur 8.89 and 8.28 per 1,000 words respectively,are given additional load than Reaction(1.79 per 1,000 words).Fourth,though Judgment resources are not prevalent in BRs,they play an indispensable role in BRs.They are often realized by a lot of linguistic forms,such as adjectives of Judgments,verbs and adverbs.Affect meanings are indispensable in the discourse of BRs though they only take up a small proportion.Affect resources account for practically the same proportion as Judgment in BRs.Affect values are mainly realized by verbs of emotion,among which the verb "like" is most frequently employed one.Finally,Negative Attitude appears as frequently as Positive Attitude.But Negative Attitude usually emerges implicitly.Based on the interpersonal function and the Appraisal theory,this thesis analyzes the attitudinal resources in English academic BRs with a view to shedding some light on the writing and teaching of English academic BRs.