| The term "genre" ultimately is derived from the Latin word for "kind" or "class". It traditionally serves to indicate different kinds of literary and artistic works. Since 1970s, the focus of stylistics, text linguistics and discourse analysis has shifted from a surface-layered description of the lexical and syntactical features or formats of discourse to a deeper and multi-layered explanation of the macro-structures and communicative functions of discourse, and thus genre analysis emerges and becomes an important branch of discourse analysis. This thesis makes a comparative study of the genre of book reviews between English and Chinese.The corpus used for the present research consists of 50 book reviews. The corpus in English is made up of 25 book reviews (approximately 3,6791 words) selected randomly from the recent publications of five English leading linguistic journals in the year 2004, likewise 25 Chinese book reviews (approximately 5, 9600 words) are selected randomly from five Chinese leading linguistic journals in 2003 and in 2004, due to the fact that there are fewer Chinese book reviews in each journal.The practical analysis is carried out on two stages. The macro-structural analysis is based on Swales' Move-Step model, following Motta-Roth's (1995) schema. Motta-Roth (1995) analyzed the rhetorical structure of book reviews at the macro-linguistic level. This schema was slightly modified during analysis to accommodate English and Chinese data. At the micro-level, this study follows the taxonomy of metadiscourse proposed by Hyland (1998a) in distinguishing textual and interpersonal types. Every metadiscoursal item will be identified and labeled into a corresponding metadiscourse sub-category. Then, the identified items are counted manually. Finally, SPSS software will be used to analyze the frequency and Chi-Square of the data in order to see whether there are significant differences in the distribution of each item across two languages.The research findings show that there are some similarities between English and Chinese book reviews, which are shown as follows: At the macro-level, both English and Chinese reviewers employ the type 1-2-3-4, 1-2-4, and 1-2-3. In Move 1, both English and Chinese reviewers prefer to use Step 1 (Defining the topic), Step 3(Informing about the author), and Step 8 (Giving the first evaluation).At the micro-level, there is little difference in the distribution of the following metadiscourse devices: frame markers, endophoric markers, evidential, code glosses, attitude markers, and person markers.There are also some differences across the two corpus: At the macro-level, the majority of English reviewers use the structural type 1-2-3-4;two new types appear in Chinese BRs: 1-3-4 and 1-3 .The former becomes the dominant schema, accounting for 48%. In terms of the occurrence of Steps, in Move 1, English reviewers tend to inform the information about the readership of the book (Step 2) and make topic generalization (Step 4), while no Chinese reviewers are found to use Step 2, and only 4% Chinese reviewers use Step 4. On the other hand, more Chinese reviewers summarize relevant previous research (Step 5) than English reviewers. And 60% Chinese reviewers will introduce the bibliographic information (Step 9), while no English reviewers are found to employ this step in Move 1. In Move 2, 84% English reviewers give a detailed description of the topic in each chapter. The percentage is much higher than that in Chinese BR, which only makes up 32%. In this sense, English book reviews can be said to be more descriptive. In Move 3, 60% English reviewers give a negative evaluation, pointing out the limitation to the specific part in the book. 40% Chinese reviewers give a positive evaluation of the whole book, citing lots of examples from the book to support the argumentation, and 48% Chinese reviewers give both positive and negative evaluation, therefore English reviewers can be said to be more critical than Chinese reviewers.At the micro-level, significant differences have been observed in the distribution of these linguistic devices: logical connectives, hedges, emphatics and relational markers across the two languages corpus.To sum up, through the macro-level and micro-level analysis of English and Chinese BRs, we can see that there are some similarities as well as differences in the same genre across two languages, which show the cross-cultural variations in the same genre. The findings above may help students gain a better understanding of textual structure of this genre in their reading and writing of book reviews. Furthermore, learning more about the structure of book reviews can also develop students' sensitivity and awareness of the subtle cross-cultural variation, and equip them with certain strategies to help them read/write book reviews. |
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