Lexical signalling: a study of unspecific nouns in book reviews

2019

The current study aimed to explore the representation of Attitude resources of Appraisal theory in English book reviews published in academic journals in the field of applied linguistics. To this end, three subcategories of Attitude resources, including appreciation, judgment, and affect were coded in a corpus of 49 book reviews published in seven academic journals. Frequency counts and percentage values were used to see to what extent the reviewers in the field of applied linguistics took advantage of evaluative language resources and to unfold the highly frequent subcategory of Attitude resources. The results of analysis demonstrated the prevalence of appreciation resources, i.e. the reviewers revealed a strong tendency to make use of appreciation resources for commenting on the scholarly works published by their counterparts in the field. They tended to put forth their overt evaluation of the books rather than judging the authors or involving their personal feelings. Although the findings revealed clear traces of subjectivity in a sample academic genre, i.e. book reviews, they also demonstrated the existing swing of the pendulum between subjectivity and objectivity in academic writing. However, as an evaluative genre, employing resources of evaluative language seems inevitable in book reviews even when they circulate in academic settings. The findings of the current study seem to expand the available literature on Appraisal Theory. Moreover, they seem to bear some implications for applied linguistics courses and academic writing and reading skills of the students.

Corporum: Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 2018

Book reviews have predominantly become one of the influential writings to reflect the general attitude/stance of a writer regarding a certain text. The ability of a writer to instigate a certain image of a text in the mind of the reader through a distinctive variety of linguistic expressions has become one of the crucial topics in the domain of academic discourse. Embedded in the theory of metadiscourse, this paper follows a corpus-based approach to linguistically analyse the metadiscursive nature of attitude markers in Pakistani English book reviews as postulated by Hyland (2004) in his generated list of interactional attitude markers. This paper analyses different linguistic categories as forms of attitude markers which book reviewers employ to project their stance. The present study not only focuses on the personal mention of authors through "I", but also explores other modes of attitude markers through which the authors have interpreted, explained, paraphrased, or presented their personal points of view (Hyland, 2004). The data of this paper comprises of fifty randomly selected English book reviews that were extracted from highly certified Pakistani English Newspapers that are, Dawn, The News and Express Tribune. Making this study corpus-based in nature, this paper also presents a raw frequency of attitude markers used within the texts. The result of the study shows that out of 100 book reviews which make 76000 words in total, a total number of 852 words are assigned to attitude markers ranging from personal mention to adverbs and adjectives which variedly reflect the defined role of authorial stance within texts. In a nutshell, book reviews have a high potential for expanding academic discourse as writers continue to use linguistic categories to project their perspectives regarding a certain phenomenon in texts.

English Language Teaching, 2014

The classes, purposes and characteristics associated with the review article in the field of applied linguistics were analyzed. The data were collected from a randomly selected corpus of thirty two review articles from a discipline-related key journal in applied linguistics. The findings revealed that different sub-genres can be identified within the applied linguistic review article genre. Three main types of review articles were therefore identified based on the analysis of linguistic devices often used by the authors, their communicative purposes, and the specialist informants' feedback: (1) the bibliographic review article which gives readers a comprehensive and descriptive record of annual works and it encompasses the literature-oriented approach, (2) the critical evaluative review article which encompasses subject-oriented approach, that is to say it identifies an idea or raises a research problem, then gives its solution by analyzing and evaluating the selective works done before in the related field, and finally it suggests a new direction, and (3) the mixed-mode review article which has the twin roles and encompasses both literature-oriented and subject-oriented approaches. A possible colony of review genre was suggested and this study further examined some of the characteristics and purposes associated with the review articles. The classification continuum, purposes, characteristics, and linguistic devices of the review articles proposed thus provide useful guidance for graduate EFL (English as a Foreign Language) students and novice writers how to monitor and make use of the review articles during their research writing.

Alzahra University, 2023

Genre analysis studies have refined our understanding of the rhetorical organization of scientific articles. The present paper reports on a study which investigated the rhetorical organization of the conclusion section of English conceptual review articles in linguistics and applied linguistics fields. Drawing on a move-based genre analysis approach, the study was based on a corpus of more than 500 English conceptual review articles. The analysis involved detecting the generic moves and sub-moves that writers use to achieve communicative purposes. The results showed that first, conclusions in English conceptual review articles differ from conclusions in research papers in terms of primary communicative purposes. Second, conclusions of review articles contain a set five moves, including 1) territory, 2) purpose, 3) structure, 4) conclusion, and 5) suggestion. Third, conclusions of review articles feature a cyclic pattern in the last two moves, as the writer reports main findings of prior research, interprets them, relates them to educational practice, and recommends further research based on what is felt most necessary. Last but not least, unlike research papers conclusions, review articles conclusions contain ‘suggestion’ as a core feature of their rhetorical organization. The results of the study benefit both theoreticians and practitioners.

Research in Language

Drawing on Systemic Functional Linguistics, this study explored variational use of nominalization in 600 textbook introductions and 200 book reviews in applied linguistics and medicine. The nominalized expressions were identified in the texts, the frequencies of the nominalization types were counted, and eventually a chi-square test was administered. Analysis of nominalization patterns across the different informational/promotional moves revealed divergent patterns in the two disciplines but insignificant differences across the genres in focus. The density of nominalizations was acknowledged in the applied linguistics introductions and book reviews. However, functional variations in the use of nominalizations were found only in the introductions. As for the proportion of nominalization to grammatical metaphor, results demonstrated a lower tendency towards nominalizing scientific information in the medicine corpus. Further research is needed to see how nominalization is exploited in ...

Hong Kong Journal of Applied Linguistics 14(1), 1-24, 2012

Adopting a mixed-methods approach and Hyland’s (2000a, 2005a) model of “metadiscourse”, this comparative study examines the textual construction of authorial voice in academic unpublished book reviews (BRs) by a group of Chinese scholars and published reviews by a group of international scholars. The textual analysis presented a rather mixed picture: the Chinese writers used significantly fewer hedges and more self-mentions in their texts than the international scholars, but there were important similarities in the approaches of the two groups of reviewers to the rhetorical construction of authorial voice. On the basis of this analysis we conclude that the construction of authorial voice is a complex and socio-culturally situated process. We also call for greater awareness and acceptance of the rhetorical particularities of texts produced respectively by different groups of writers on the part of the English academic community. This research aims to complicate views about the construction of authorial voice in the relatively under-researched genre of academic BRs and to highlight the critical importance of an academic literacy perspective.

ESP approaches to the study of the review article genre, particularly in applied linguistics, has received little attention (Noguchi, 2006; Swales, 2004). The current research investigates the rhetorical structure of thematic units in 32 randomly-selected review articles taken from a prestigious journal in applied linguistics. Its main attempt is to analyze and describe the rhetorical structure for the theme-bound units in the Body section of review articles. Using Swalesian moves analysis, the results indicate that although review articles have some features in common with other academic review genres such as literature reviews (Kwan, 2006; Swales, 2004) there are unique features, such as praising/ criticizing the works and giving suggestions to the issues in a research, that distinguish the review article genre from other academic discourses such as research articles. This study not only suggests the classification of review article text types, but also describes the textual organ...

Issues in Language Studies

The aim of this research is (1) to analyse the macro-organisational structure and (2) to investigate and describe the analytical sections of the data. The data, drawn from a randomly selected corpus of 32 review articles, was analysed following Swales’ (1990) genre analysis to describe and investigate the schematic structure of the review article genre. The findings revealed that the CARS model was often observed in this genre. Moreover, although both review articles and research articles have been considered sub-genres of the research genre, there is a significant variation among them in terms of the schematic structure, rhetorical strategies, and functions. The schematic structure and functions of the review article genre were further investigated by consulting the specialist informants. The macroorganisational structure of this genre proposed hence provide the instructive guidance for EFL graduates and junior researchers how to review the developments critically during their rese...

Asian Social Science and Humanities Research Journal (ASHREJ)

The present paper seeks to examine the rhetorical structure of the literature review (LR) sections of English research articles (RAs) written by Egyptian researchers in the field of linguistics. For this purpose, a sample of ten LRs was selected from RAs published in local and international English-medium journals in linguistics between 2013 and 2019. The study deployed hybrid techniques and approaches for data collection (random/non-random sampling) and data analysis (genre-based/corpus-driven and qualitative/quantitative). Findings showed rhetorical variation in the LRs written by both groups, especially concerning Move 2 and Move 3 that were used more frequently in the international sample than in the local one, where the focus was on Move 1. In addition, some new steps emerged. The findings also shed light on the problems within the rhetorical structure of the LRs published locally, implying that the lack of rhetorical knowledge is one of the major reasons that hinder writing pr...

Negative evaluation is a major component of academic discourse (Salager-Meyer & Zambrano, 2001) but an evasive sociodiscursive phenomenon as it is often activated through a variable set of co-occurring, usually indirect resources (Shaw 2004). It is, therefore, a must to integrate a systemic (Martin & White 2005) and a strategic approach (Menendez 2005) to account for negative evaluative lexicogrammatical resources organised in terms of discursive strategies (cf. Navarro in press). In this paper I aim at providing a preliminary system of mostly non-evaluative processes that when directly or indirectly expressed by the reviewer, the reviewee or the reviewed book can inferentially realize a negative evaluation. I study qualitatively and quantitatively a corpus of 90 randomly selected Spanish academic book reviews published during the second half of the 20th Century. Results show that there is a diachronically stable set of mental (perceptive, cognitive and emotive) and material (transformative) processes expressed by the reviewer; existential processes expressed by the reviewed book; and material, mental and verbal processes expressed by the reviewee. These elements typically gain an interpersonal negative-evaluative dimension when used together with negative mood adjuncts and some key expectations about the reviewer and reviewees role within the genre. Thus, an interpersonally neutral set of resources are consistently used to attribute an indirect negative evaluation.