Chapter published in:
Persuasion in Public Discourse: Cognitive and functional perspectives
Edited by Jana Pelclová and Wei-lun Lu
[Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture 79] 2018
► pp. 227–258

Chapter 10
Persuasion in academic discourse

Cross-cultural variation in Anglophone and Czech academic book reviews

This chapter studies persuasion in academic book reviews from a cross-cultural perspective. After discussing the rhetorical structure of book reviews, the study explores the strategic means used by the authors of reviews to represent themselves as expert members of the disciplinary community, show authorial involvement, and open a dialogic space for the negotiation of their opinions and views. The analysis of citation practices, personal structures, and evaluation acts is carried out on a corpus of book reviews published in the linguistics journals Journal of English for Academic Purposes and Slovo a Slovesnost. The findings indicate that while both Anglophone and Czech linguists exploit these linguistic means for persuasive purposes, there is cross-cultural variation in their rate of occurrence and rhetorical functions.

Keywords: persuasion, academic discourse, genre, book reviews, cross-cultural variation, evaluative acts, citations, personal pronouns, rhetorical moves
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The genre of academic book reviews
  • 3.Persuasion in book reviews
  • 4.Cross-cultural variation: The Czech and the Anglophone academic discourse traditions
  • 5.Data and methodology
  • 6.Findings and discussion
    • 6.1Rhetorical structure
    • 6.2Citation
    • 6.3Personal structures
    • 6.4Evaluative acts
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Note
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Published online: 08 August 2018
https://doi.org/10.1075/dapsac.79.11don
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