The strategy of presenting criticisms in book reviews |
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Ruta Marcinkeviciene (Kaunas) |
The presentation comprises pragmatics, discourse analysis and corpus
linguistics and investigates the strategy of presenting criticisms in book
reviews. The object of analysis is the corpus of Linguist list book reviews
from the last two years and the tool used for its processing is WordSmith
Tools.
The genre of a book review requires to include evaluation beside an
objective reflection of contents. The evaluation presupposes both positive and
negative features of the book reviewed. In reality, though, book reviews differ
from the evaluative point of view and form several types:
a) book reviews with no evalutation whatsoever,
b) book reviews with one lateral evaluation (predominantly positive or
negative),
c) book reviews with multilateral, i.e. both positive and negative
evaluation. The latter type was the object of the analysis.
The preliminary unautomatied analysis of Linguist list book reviews revealed
the strategy of presentation of criticisms that could be called pairing
strategy when positive and negative features of a book are presented in
clusters, positive features proceeding negative ones. The surface or textual
presentation of this pragmatic strategy manifests itself in the use of the
linking adjuncts, indicatings contrasts and alternatives, e.g. however,
nevertheless, thought, etc. These linking adjunts served as node words in
compilation of concordances that served as the bases to reserch the specific
ways that the pairing strategy is carried out.