Dynamic Evaluation And Prosodic Realization In Academic Book Review

Academic book review (thereafter academic BRs), as a sub-genre of academicdiscourses, has been given additional weight in recent years. A wealth of valuableresearches have been conducted from different perspectives such as the genericstructure or semantic features of the academic BRs, but these studies tend to be staticand decontextualized which often neglect the understanding of some impliedinterpersonal meanings. However, the genre of academic BRs has its uniqueness, that isits dual demands-objectivity and negotiativeness. On one hand, the reviewer needs todescribe the viewpoints of the book’s author objectively without the intervention of anypersonal subjective color. On the other hand, evaluation is the soul of academic BRs.Reviewers have the responsibility of evaluating, including both the strengths and theshortcomings of the book or its author. Thus, reviewers are often in a complexinterpersonal relations among the book’s author, the potential readers, and the wholeacademic community. So some strategies are usually adopted by reviewers to seek theinterpersonal negotiation to make their evaluation more convincing. Due to theuniqueness of the genre of the academic BRs, an institution specific and also contextsensitive analytical perspective is badly needed. Therefore, the thesis is mainly based onthe Appraisal Theory and draws inspiration from Macken-Horarik’s (2003b) model ofcontextual frames aiming to explore the dynamic evaluation and prosodic realization inthe genre of academic BRs by proposing a new, comprehensive analytical frameworkfrom lexical-grammatical level to discourse-semantic level.At the lexical-grammatical level, some evaluative mechanisms and semanticfeatures will be presented and analysed, and how these linguistic resources interactprosodically due to the influence of the local lexical-grammatical context to produceadditional evaluative meaning will also be explored. While at the discourse-semantic level, the global context is taken into consideration by which evaluative meaningsaccumulate and sprawl out over phases of a text to strategically align readers as a textunfolds will be explored. Therefore, a dynamic and synoptic analytical framework canbe presented.In this thesis,50academic book review discourses covering many linguisticbranches are chosen from a forum of English book reviews published in the form ofelectric collection for those interested in linguistics to discuss linguistic issues andexchange linguistic information.The main contributions of the thesis are firstly to propose a more comprehensiveand comparatively sound analytical framework and also a new perspective for theexploration of the semantic features and the interpersonal strategies unique to the genreof academic BRs. And moreover, a pedagogical implication will provide inspiration forboth the book reviewers as well as the beginners in the process of the review writing.The research results of the thesis will contribute to develop their ability of composingbook reviews both from the functional and from the formal perspectives.