Engagement Meanings In Academic Book Reviews In Linguistics

With increasing number of academic books flowing into the book market recently, it becomes necessary for the potential readers to evaluate the quality of a book. Therefore, the academic book review which serves to make comments and evaluations on the theoretical points, qualities, academic levels as well as the values of a book, draws people’s increasing attentions. Academic book review usually contains a schematic structure, which covers Introduction, Overview and Evaluation. In the stages of Introduction and Overview, the book reviewer often makes an objective and brief overview about the book under review, while in the stage of Evaluation, the book reviewer will make critical judgements about the contents and theoretical values of a book. Thus, it is safe to say the Evaluation part is the soul of the book review and will definitely contain abundant appraisal resources, especially the engagement resources. Therefore, the present study, based on self-built corpus, intends to carry out a systemic research on the distributions and realizations of the engagement meanings in the evaluation stages of academic book reviews in linguistics on the basis of Martin and White’s (2005) Appraisal theory.The research data in present study all come from three leading journals---Journal of Pragmatics, Journal of English for Academic Purposes and Journal of Second Language Writing as well as one Internet website http://linguistlist.org/pubs/reviews. To ensure the reliability of the analysis, all40book reviews employed here are well-written book reviews with a typical generic structure; that is to say, all book reviews include Introduction, Overview and Evaluation. In this paper, quantitative and qualitative research methods are employed to describe and analyze the engagement resources. To annotate the engagement resources in these40academic book reviews in a more scientific way, the research instrument of UAM CorpusTool2.6.7is applied, which can help us find out how different engagement resources are distributed. Next, qualitative research is conducted to provide some convincing illustrations for those findings and to illustrate how engagement meanings are realized. The findings of the study can be summarized as follows:first, the evaluation parts of academic book reviews are found to contain abundant engagement resources, totaling812; second, these engagement resources have different occurrence frequencies, with Expansion resources(52.2%) being much more frequently employed than Contraction ones(47.8%); third, the entertain resources take up the largest part among all engagement resources in40samples; finally, the concessive structure enjoys a relatively large proportion in the evaluation stage of a book review, with each review containing3.9concessive structures on average, and the word however is found to be the most frequently used countering resource.By analyzing the engagement meanings in academic book reviews, the present study has made contributions to the developments of the theory and provided some practical suggestions. Firstly, this study can enrich the application of Appraisal theory, and meanwhile can broaden the research scope of academic book reviews. Secondly, the findings and analyses may provide some constructive suggestions for book reviewers, so as to make them better handle the subtle and complex appraisal strategies, thus improving the persuasiveness ol the book review. What’s more, this study has pedagogic significance. It can help students’ to apprehend academic book reviews, and shed lights on how to better express opinions, which may improve their English writing skills.