| The dissertation intends to study evaluation in English academic book reviews (BRs) at the semantic, lexico-grammatical and pragmatic levels by adopting a mixed approach that combines quantitative statistics and qualitative analysis. The research is based on the belief that evaluative meaning is an important feature possessed by language, especially in the genre of BRs which is highly loaded with evaluative expressions.The dissertation makes an attempt to define evaluation from the perspectives of axiology, linguistics and communication studies. Evaluation is thus defined as the value judgment (evaluative parameters optionally modified by up-scaling or down-scaling modifications) made by the evaluator (subject of evaluation) towards the evaluated (object of evaluation) based on some evaluative justifications which may reflect the value system or norms that stand behind a community. In addition, holding a firm belief that the linguistic expression of evaluation should be a unified whole that consists of meaning, form and strategy, the dissertation has proposed a synthetic theoretical model for analyzing evaluation in the genre of academic book reviews at three levels that involve semantic meaning, lexico-grammatical patterns and pragmatic strategies.Then, based on a self-complied corpus of 200 reviews (100 written by female and 100 by male reviewers) that comes from a stratified randomsampling of 1600 on the web-site the Linguist List, the dissertation adopts a corpus-based approach to investigate evaluation in BRs at the three above-mentioned levels by using a series of instruments to facilitate the coding and searching work. To be specific, Collins 3.1.0 is used to identify lexis whose evaluative meaning is not obvious; CorpusTool 1.1 is used to design the semantic scheme of evaluative parameters as well as modifications and the pragmatic scheme of evaluative strategies, which can be applied to code the whole corpus at the two different levels; and finally, AntConc 3.2.0 is used to retrieve concordance lines that contain relevant grammatical patterns to produce basic syntactic patterns that are unique to the genre of BRs.The research has yielded some significant findings as follows. In terms of the semantic realizations of evaluation in BRs, the results reveal five parameters that categorically appear in the corpus and they are Emotivity, Expectedness, Possibility/Necessity, Reliability and Style. Emotivity, as the most essential parameter, is reduced from the ATTITUDE system and is sub-divided into Affect, Judgment and Appreciation. However, different from Appraisal, there are no further sub-divisions concerning Affect and Judgment both due to their rare appearance in the corpus and for the sake of convenient semantic coding work. Appreciation is further sub-divided into Reaction, Comprehensibility, Structure and Valuation according to the semantic realizations in the corpus. Besides, the semantic parameters can optionally be modified by the modification system which, as a simplified version of GRADUATION in Appraisal Theory, can be classified into Force and Focus types as well as up-scaling and down-scaling kinds. The results show that up-scaling modifications usually function to intensify the positive tone of evaluation whereas down-scaling modifications tend to soften the negative tone of evaluation, which may indicate the reviewers' concern of the authors' positive face wants. In addition, the dissertation makes a comparison of evaluations in reviews written by female and male reviewers and finds that the occurring frequencies concerning features including positive Emotivity and up-scaled positive evaluation as well as the down-scaled negative evaluation are quite similar in the two types of reviews. This may indicate that the influence exerted by gender difference upon the evaluative expressions is not obvious in the objective academic genre of BRs. As regards the grammatical realizations of evaluation in linguistic BRs, the dissertation has identified 11 general syntactic types with further optional sub-types of variations that are loaded with evaluative meaning. As for the pragmatic strategies, the study finds that reviewers mainly use politeness strategies and objectivity strategies to satisfy the complex interpersonal demands of the special genre of BRs and to become convincing in order to be easily accepted by the general audience.The present study may reveal some meaningful aspects and yield certain practical implications. The semantic realizations of evaluation in BRs can indicate something about the general practice and the acknowledged value system behind the academic discourse community, which may restrict and specify the writing and communicating conventions the members are supposed to follow. The basic lexical categories and syntactic patterns for evaluation in BRs will be very useful for the students' acquisition and teachers' academic teaching when review writing becomes the required skill. The pragmatic strategies of evaluations have equally important implications for writing a good review and even communicating successfully with other members in the discourse community. However, due to the intrinsic complexity of evaluation, the limitations concerning the corpus and the color of subjectivity inevitably involved in the framework, the research topic still needs further improvement and enrichment in future studies.
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