Attitude Markers in Book Reviews: The Case of Applied Linguistics Discourse Community

كارشناسي ارشد

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 a corpus of 49 book reviews published in seven academic journals. Taking into account the subcategories of Attitude resources in Appraisal theory (Martin & White, 2005), the book reviews were scrutinized. Frequency counts and percentage values were used to see to what extent the reviewers in the field of applied linguistics took advantage of eva​luative language resources and to unfold the highly frequency subcategory of Attitude resources. The results of the analysis demonstrated the preva​lence 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 of applied linguistics. They tended to put forth their overt eva​luation 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 eva​luative genre, employing resources of eva​luative 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.

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دانشگاه علم و صنعت ايران

دكتر محمود ميرطباطبايي

زبان انگليسي

دكتر اكرم نيرنيا