Cover not available
Article published In:
Pragmatics
Vol. 28:2 (2018) ► pp.159–183

A genre-pragmatic analysis of Arabic academic book reviews (ArBRs)

| Jordan University of Science and Technology

This study aims to investigate the rhetorical genre components and the pragmatic evaluation options used to articulate the communicative function of ArBR genre, and find out how these generic and evaluation options contrast with those reported in other languages and cultures. To this end, a corpus of 50 book reviews written by 50 Arab reviewers was collected and analyzed within the rhetorical components developed and applied by Motta-Roth (1998) to English book reviews. The present study drew on Hyland (2000), Gea Valor (2000–2001), Moreno and Suárez (2008a) and Alcaraz-Ariza (2010) in order to examine how the qualities of ArBRs are evaluated and in which terms (i.e., criticism or praise). The results indicated that the Arab reviewers employed additional sub-moves that have not been used by other researchers. Unlike English book reviewers, Arab reviewers try to avoid criticism. Instead, they usually devote most of their book reviews to describe and summarize uncritically although critical appraisal is supposed to be the backbone of this genre. These purposive generic component preferences and evaluation tendencies can be explained with reference to the goal of the academic community and the writing culture that constrain Arab reviewers' academic behavior. I hope that the results of this study will provide graduate students and novice researchers with further awareness of the acceptable generic strategies, the linguistic choices and pragmatic evaluative options that can be used to write an evaluation of a piece of research.

Keywords: Genre, Academic discourse, Book review, Arabic
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Literature review
  • 3.Analytical framework and methods
  • 4.The corpus
  • 5.Data analysis
    • 5.1Introducing the book
    • 5.2Describing the book
    • 5.3Evaluating
      • 5.3.1What is being evaluated in ArBRs and in which terms?
      • 5.3.2Mitigating criticism in ArBRs
    • 5.4Closing
  • 6.Discussion
  • 7.Concluding remarks
  • Acknowledgements
  • Transliteration
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.
Published online: 7 May 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/prag.17006.ala
References (39)
Al-Ali, M.
2005 “Communicating Messages of Solidarity, Promotion, and Pride in Death Announcements Genre in Jordanian Newspapers.” Discourse and Society 161: 5–31. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Al-Ali, M., and Y. Sahawneh
2011 “Rhetorical and Textual Organization of English and Arabic Ph.D. Dissertation Abstracts in Linguistics.” SKY Journal of Linguistics 241: 7–39.Google Scholar
Alcaraz-Ariza, M.
2010 “Evaluation in English Medium Medical Book Reviews.” International Journal of English Studies 2 (1): 137–153. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Belcher, D.
1995 “Writing Critically across Curriculum.” In Academic Writing in a Second Language: Essays on Research and Pedagogy, ed. by D. Belcher, and D. Braine, 135–155. Norwood, NY: Ablex.Google Scholar
Bhatia, V.
1993 Analyzing Genre: Language Use in Professional Settings. London: Longman.Google Scholar
2004 Worlds of Written Discourse. London: Continuum.Google Scholar
Brown, P., and S. Levinson
1987 Politeness: Some Universals in Language Use. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Brown, G., and G. Yule
1983 Discourse Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Felber, L.
2002 “The Book Review: Scholarly and Editorial Responsibility.” Journal of Scholarly Publication 33 (3): 166–172. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gea Valor, M.
2000 A Pragmatic Approach to Politeness and Modality in the Book Review Articles. SELL Monograph. Valencia: Universitat Valencia.Google Scholar
2000–2001 “The Coding of Linguistic Politeness in the Academic Book Reviews.” Pragmalinguistica 8–91: 165–178.Google Scholar
Gea-Valor, M.
2014 “From ‘Readers may be left wondering’ to ‘I’m genuinely puzzled’: The Construction of Self and Others in Fiction Book Reviews.” In Dialogicity in Written Specialised Genres, ed. by L. Gil-Salom, and C. Soler-Monreal, 113–134. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Halliday, M.
1994 An introduction to Functional Grammar (2nd ed.). London & New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Hartley, J.
2006 “Reading a Writing Book Reviews across Disciplines.” Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 57 (9): 1194–1207. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hunston, S.
1993 “Evaluation and Ideology in Scientific Writing.” In Register Analysis: Theory and Practice, ed. by M. Ghadessy, 57–73. London: Pinter.Google Scholar
1994 “Evaluation and Organization in a Sample of Written Academic Discourse.” In Advances in Written Text Analysis, ed. by M. Coulthard, 191–218. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Hyland, K.
2000 Disciplinary Discourses. Social Interactions in Academic Writing. Harlow: Pearson Education.Google Scholar
Itakura, H., and A. Tsui
2011 “Evaluation in Academic Discourse: Managing Criticism in Japanese and English Book Reviews.” Journal of Pragmatics 431: 1366–1379. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Johnson, D.
1992 “Compliments and Politeness in Peer-review Texts.” Applied Linguistics 13 (1): 51–71. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Johnson, D., and D. Roen
1992 “Complimenting and Involvement in Peer Reviews: Gender Variation.” Language and Society 211: 27–57. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lores-Sanz, R.
2012 “Local Disciplines, Local Cultures: Praise and Criticism in British and Spanish History Reviews.” Brno Studies in English 38 (2): 97–116. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lindholm-Romantschuk, Y.
1998 Scholarly Book Reviewing in the Social Sciences and Humanities: The Flow of Ideas within and amongst Disciplines. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.Google Scholar
Martin, J., and P. White
2005 The Language of Evaluation. Appraisal in English. Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Morrow, J.
2006 “The Origin of the Allah Lexicon.” In Arabic, Islam, and the Allah Lexicon, ed. by J. Morrow, 115–187. New York: Edwin Mellen Press.Google Scholar
Moreno, A., and L. Suarez
2008a “A Study of Critical Attitude across English and Spanish Academic Book Reviews.” Journal of English for Academic Purposes 71: 15–26. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2008b “A Framework for Comparing Evaluation Resources across Academic Texts.” Text and Talk 28 (6): 749–769. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2009 “Academic Book Reviews in English and Spanish: Critical Comments and Rhetorical Structure.” In Academic Evaluation: Review Genres in University Settings, ed. by K. Hyland, and D. Giuliana, 161–178. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Motta-Roth, D.
1998 “Discourse Analysis and Academic Book Reviews: A Study of Text and Disciplinary Cultures.” In Genre Studies in English for Academic Purposes, ed. by I. Fortanet, S. Posteguillo, J. C. Palmer, and J. Coll, 29–559. Colleccio Summa, Seri Filolgia 9. Castellón: Universitat Jaume I.Google Scholar
Nicolaisen, J.
2002 “Structure-based Interpretation of Scholarly Book Reviews: A New Research Technique.” In Emerging Frameworks and Methods: Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Conceptions of Library and Information Science, ed. by H. Bruce, R. Fidel, P. Ingwersen, and P. Vakkari, 123–135. Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited.Google Scholar
Salager-Meyer, F., and M. Alcaraz-Ariza
2004 “Negative Appraisals in Academic Book Reviews; A Cross-Linguistic Approach.” In International Aspects of Specialized Communication, ed. by C. Candlin, and M. Gotti, 149–172. Bern: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
Salager-Meyer, F., M. Angeles, A. Ariza, and N. Zambrano
2003 “The Scimitar, the Dagger and the Glove: Intercultural Differences in the Rhetoric of Criticism in Spanish, French and English Medical Discourse (1930–1995).” English for Specific Purposes 22 (3): 223–247. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Salager-Meyer, F., M. Angeles, A. Ariza, and M. Berbesi
2007 “Collegiality, Critique and the Construction of Scientific Argumentation in Medical Book Reviews: A Diachronic Approach.” Journal of Pragmatics 391: 1758–1774. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Stotesbury, H.
2003 “Evaluation in Research Article Abstracts in the Narrative and Hard Sciences.” Journal of English for Academic Purposes 21: 327–342. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Suárez, T., and A. Moreno
2008 “The Rhetorical Structure of Academic Book Reviews of Literature: An English-Spanish Cross-Linguistic Approach.” In Contrastive Rhetoric: Reaching to Intercultural Rhetoric, ed. by U. Connor, E. Nagelhout, and W. Rozycki, 147–168. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamin Publishing Company. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Swales, J.
1990 Genre Analysis: English in Academic and Research Settings. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.Google Scholar
Thetela, P.
1997 “Evaluated Entities and Parameters of Value in Academic Research Articles.” English for Specific Purposes 16 (2): 101–118. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Thompson, G., and S. Hunston
2000 “Evaluation: An Introduction.” In Evaluation in Text, ed. by S. Hunston, and G. Thompson, 1–27. Oxford: Oxford University press.Google Scholar
Vandenbroucke, J., and A. de Craen
2001 “Alternative Medicine: A “Mirror Image” for Scientific Reasoning in Conventional Medicine.” Annals of Internal Medicine 1351: 507–513. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cited by (2)

Cited by 2 other publications

Tan, Hua
2023. What makes a good book review on translation studies? An interview with Reviews Editor Anna Strowe. Asia Pacific Translation and Intercultural Studies 10:2 ► pp. 179 ff. DOI logo
Ho, Mei-ching
2022. A corpus-pragmatics approach to evaluation in professor reviews. Concentric. Studies in Linguistics 48:1 ► pp. 114 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 15 july 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.