Journal of Siberian Federal University. Humanities & Social Sciences / Negative Evaluation in Russian Academic Book Review: Across Critical Reflection and Ritual Genre (Based on Reviews of Monographs on Sociology in 2015–2022)

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Issue
Journal of Siberian Federal University. Humanities & Social Sciences. 2022 15 (11)
Authors
Chernyavskaya, Valeria E.
Contact information
Chernyavskaya, Valeria E.: Peter the Great St. Petersburg Polytechnic University Saint Petersburg State University St. Petersburg, Russian Federation;
Keywords
academic book review; appraisal; epistemic appraisal; mitigation devices
Abstract

The present paper discusses the review as one of the main genres in the scientific communication and expert activity. The academic book review as a genre under consideration is becoming increasingly relevant. Evaluation is a key characteristic of a review and its identifying feature as a textual genre. The research question within this paper is related to how scientific criticism and the evaluative stance of the subject are expressed in the text of the review. Scientific criticism is focused as an explicit expression of a negative, negatively evaluative attitude, disagreement with the opinion of another researcher and his/her explanatory approach. The paper investigates how criticism is managed in Russian book reviews of monographs in the field of sociology, published in the period from 2015 to 2022 in leading Russian journals. The approach is corpus-based and the book review corpus consists of 50 reviews. The analyses proceeded as follows: based on the structural and compositional organization of the review, its main functional and thematic units, there were identified contexts containing linguistic items with the semantics of epistemic evaluation, i. e positive or negative judgements of the reviewer. At the second stage, contexts were selected in which the negative evaluation attitude of the reviewer to the content (scientific result), structure and practical application of the monograph under review. Explicit evaluation resources were considered. There were identified 618 evaluative contexts, 460 contexts reveal a positive evaluation, 158 a negative evaluation. The contexts were analyzed by the methods of pragma-semantic analysis, discursive analysis. The study revealed the trend to “non-critical” book reviews that do not express negative evaluative judgments towards monographs under review. When expressing a negative evaluation, criticism is presented indirectly with mitigation devices, which reduce the degree of its categoricalness and directness. As a result of the analysis, characteristic techniques and linguistic choices of mitigated criticism are discussed

Pages
1680–1698
DOI
10.17516/1997-1370-0944
Paper at repository of SibFU
https://elib.sfu-kras.ru/handle/2311/148785

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