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Article published In:
Revista Española de Lingüística Aplicada/Spanish Journal of Applied Linguistics
Vol. 31:1 (2018) ► pp.408–430

A contrastive study on mitigation of criticism in English and Chinese book reviews

| University of Chinese Academy of Sciences

The present article is a corpus-based contrastive study on mitigation of criticism in linguistic book reviews in English and in Chinese. It is based on the face theory of Brown and Levinson (1987) and follows the framework of Johnson and Roen (1992). The present article shows the following results: (1) at the local level, there are thirteen mitigation devices in the corpus, of which only six have been introduced by previous studies; devices of ‘generalization’ and ‘metaphorical statement’ are specific to the English sub-corpus, whereas ‘omission’ is only found in Chinese; (2) at the global level, English writers maintain an overall supportive tone with praise largely distributed in both openings and closings, whereas their Chinese counterparts sound much impartial. Differences in findings are then explained from perspectives of cultural values and functions of book reviews.

Keywords: mitigation, book reviews, politeness strategy, local level, global level
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Book reviews from a pragmatic perspective
  • 3.Methodology
    • 3.1Working definitions
    • 3.2The corpus
    • 3.3Research procedures
  • 4.Findings
    • 4.1Findings at the local level
      • 4.1.1An overall picture of devices to mitigate criticism
      • 4.1.2Further exploration of other mitigation devices
        • 4.1.2.1Mitigation devices in both English and Chinese BRs
        • 4.1.2.2Mitigation devices specific to English BRs
        • 4.1.2.3Mitigation device specific to Chinese BRs
    • 4.2Findings at the global level
      • 4.2.1Openings
      • 4.2.2Closings
  • 5.Discussion
    • 5.1Divergence in cultural values
    • 5.2Divergence in functions of BRs
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Note
  • References
Published online: 27 August 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/resla.15027.qia
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