المستخلص: |
Academic book reviews are the texts that typically appear at the end of many academic journals whose major communicative purpose is two-fold: (1) to inform readers about new books in a given discipline and, principally, (2) to evaluate the scholarly work of a professional peer within the scholarly community (Lindholm- Romantschuk 1998:40). The present paper investigates the distribution and realization of the expressive speech acts in the genre of academic book reviews. Thirty English applied linguistics reviews are collected for the present study corpus. The data analysis has come up with the findings that compliments and criticisms are the two major types of expressives employed in those reviews. They serve to express positive or negative comments on the books under review, as is determined by the evaluative nature of the genre of academic book reviews. As far as politeness is concerned, the result that compliments have outnumbered criticisms, leads to the conclusion that book reviewers tend to employ more face-saving acts than face-threatening ones to create rapport and harmony with their interviewees. That is, book reviewers have complimented more often than they have criticized. Both compliments and criticisms are realized via four semantic categories, namely, adjectival, adverbial, verbal, and nominal categories. The present paper has some theoretical implication in that it contributes to the understanding of the academic genre of book reviews in relation to speech acts theory
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