A Generic Approach: Attitudinal Potential Of English Academic Book Reviews

English academic book reviewing is becoming an increasingly important genre and social practice, which helps people to keep up with the latest development in their special fields or disciplines for the newest information retrieval, promoting academic exchange and academic advancement. The present study attempts to explore the generic structure and attitudinal potential of English academic book reviews (EABRs), drawing on the model of GSP and of Appraisal as the theoretical point of departure. Language choices in the data are interpreted with reference to the theory.Based on the theoretical framework of Hasan's Generic Structure Potential (GSP), this study carries out an analysis of twenty five EABRs which are selected randomly from six leading international Journals. It first identifies the communicative purposes of EABRs. Then the Contextual Configuration (CC) of EABRs is worked out. In light of the communicative purposes and the CC of EABRs, a nine-element generic structure is proposed, including Title (T), Heading (bibliographic information about the book) (H), A general introduction of the book under review (IB), Summary of the content of each chapter of the book (SC), Major strengths or interesting aspects of the book (SB), Weaknesses of the book (WB), Evaluation (E), Reference (R), and Information about the reviewer (IR), and then the GSP of EABRs is assumed based on the data analysis and further rationalized with the help of the CC of EABRs. This study finds that H, IB, SC, E and IR are obligatory elements which define EABR genre, while the other four are optional. The elements occur in a certain sequence according to specific situations.This study goes further to explore the attitudinal generic features of EABRs under the framework of Appraisal theory. The general preferences for Attitude and for the modes of expression in EABR genre as a whole as well as in its different generic structures are identified. In terms of EABRs as a whole, there is a preference for encoding Attitude as Appreciation rather than the more personal Affect or Judgment, and furthermore for encoding Appreciation as Valuation; there is an extensive range of Graduation resources, including the grading of explicit Attitude and the grading of non-attitudinal meanings, and the preference is for the foregrounding of the latter; positive Attitude accounts for a predominant percentage in EABRs, and there is no obvious inclination in encoding Attitude explicitly or implicitly, with only slight preference for the implicit one, while negative Attitude is rarely employed and is mostly expressed implicitly. From the perspective of generic structure, different elements take on different preferences for attitudinal resources and modes of expression. The three sub-systems of Attitude as well as their modes of expression are distributed prosodically across the different elements in EABRs.The way Attitude is encoded in texts contributes to the distinctive generic feature of EABRs, in which reviewers manage to meet the dual demands of'persuasion'and 'objectivity'as they argue for their evaluation. The overall preference for encoding Attitude as Appreciation and the frequent employment of Graduation resources in evoking Attitude indirectly in all the texts reflect the objectified nature of EABRs.From a pedagogic perspective, the GSP model can lead students to a general understanding of this genre, and the explanations of evaluative stance in this study provide insights and resources for teachers to assist students in modeling evaluative strategies in writing EABRs.