A Diachronic Investigation Of Promotion In Academic Book Reviews In Applied Linguistics

Traditional points of view often regard academic discourse as static,impersonal,and individually-oriented,however,many recent studies point out that the academic writing is in fact evolving,flexible,and interactional.The academic book review(BR)genre is a typical representative of the complex and competitive academic world in that it involves various participants and the phenomenon of negative evaluation that may pose a threat to the harmonious relationship within the community.Most of previous research has focused on the evaluative languages in academic BRs either through the study of cross-cultural comparison or the exploration of the category of evaluation.Different from previous cross-sectional way,the present study tries to take a diachronic approach to investigate the genre evolution of the academic book review with a focus on the management of negative evaluation.Bhatia's(2004)mention of promotional elements mixed within the academic genre inspires the conduction of this study so as to examine the private intention of the academic book reviewers.Hyland(2004)has investigated the social interactions in academic book reviews in different disciplines through the study of the position and management of both positive and negative evaluation,which lays the foundation for the present study.At the micro level,the methodology adopted in the thesis draws from Itakura and Tsui's(2011)expansive study of Hyland's(2004)and Myers'(1989)analysis of criticisms in academic book reviews.The corpus covers a total of 133 book reviews ranging from the year 1996 to 2015 from the journal Applied Linguistics,which are divided into two Blocks(Block A:1996-2005;Block B:2006-2015)respectively.The results show that most book reviews in the field of applied linguistics still follow the "praise-criticism-praise"pattern mentioned by Hyland(2004).Criticisms seldom appear in the openings but they are more likely to take the near-end positions and sometimes they appear in the closings.In terms of the frequency of critical BR,there is no significant difference between the two Blocks showing that most academic BRs follow the established feature of conveying negative comments besides the positive ones.Nevertheless,the frequency of mitigated criticisms in the later 10 years of BRs is significantly higher than that in the earlier 10 years of BRs,indicating that the more recent book reviewers gradually develop the genre awareness to hide their private intention by expressing criticisms more implicitly.With regard to specific mitigation devices,the five main devices(See Section 3.1 in Chapter 3)mentioned by Itakura and Tsui(2011)are still most frequently used.Three new mitigation devices('attributing problems to the general discipline','criticism-praise pair',and 'explaining and defending for the book')are mainly found in Block B,which reflects that more recent book reviewers seek more ways to redress the critical effect so as to maintain the book's reputation and even realize the promotional end.