Training, Language and Culture (Jun 2023)
To be or not to be critical in academic communication? Pragmatics of evaluative language in Russian academic book reviews
Abstract
Evaluation is considered a key tool in professional communication as well as a signal of the communicants’ engagement in professional discourse. Linguistic analysis of evaluative devices employed in the professional field is of great importance as it indicates the level of professional reflection in the community which in its turn affects the production of a new research result. Considering evaluation is an integral concept of the review, this paper focuses on the pragmatics of evaluative language in Russian academic reviewing practice to explore how criticism contributes to the determining and advancing of a new result and what kind of linguistic choices are conducive to expressing critical attitude of the peer reviewer. The study introduces an analysis of a corpus of forty Russian book reviews in the field of sociology. The structure of the review text was analysed to reveal the contexts with linguistic instances conveying positive and negative evaluation by the reviewer (the presented result), the structure, practical value, and applicability of the academic book under review. The instances of criticism were identified based on their lexical and grammatical features, and a pragma-semantic analysis was employed to explore the contexts found. Negative evaluation was further subcategorised into direct explicit disagreement and indirect negative evaluation (mitigated evaluation). Characteristic strategies of mitigated criticism were summarised. The findings show that criticism expressed is often restrained and devoid of direct disagreement with the author. Criticism is managed by various evaluative de-intensifiers which serve to tone down and mitigate it. Praise is more prominently used in Russian book reviews to establish solidarity. The study outlines the typical strategies of criticism such as limited critical evaluation, critical judgement as an alternative opinion, presenting the peer as the collective subject, praise criticism, and default of first-person pronouns in the peer’s identification. The study suggests that reviews should mark and advance a new significant result, as an implicit and vague character of evaluation might hinder scientific knowledge transfer and communication between specialists.
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