Enacting Criticism In’conflict Articles’:a Diachronic Approach

This thesis reports a diachronic study on the act of criticism performed in conflict articles in the field of applied linguistics. It aims at figuring out the emerging regularities and their development of the realization of criticism during the last two decades. Altogether three dimensions are investigated:distribution of different categories of criticism, use of mitigating strategies, and mitigating degree of all criticism recorded in the corpus.Forty conflict articles are randomly collected from the journals of Applied Linguistics and TESOL Quarterly. They are divided into to two corpora:twenty in Block A (1990-99) and twenty in Block B (2000-09). Through the combination of qualitative and quantitative analysis of the data, the present study yields the following findings:A. Five categories of criticism are recognized:contextual, conceptual, textual, stylistic, and personal. Diachronically the proportion of conceptual criticism has increased, while the proportion of each of the other four has decreased.B. Eight specific strategies are revealed under two broad categories of mitigating strategies, namely, positive politeness and negative politeness. While hedges are used most frequently in both corpora, negative politeness strategies are generally employed more often in the recent ten years.C. As mitigated criticism in Block B exhibits higher frequency than that in Block A, the degree of mitigation has shown an upward trend during the last two decades.Various factors accounting for the above findings are explored to some extent. They include social environment, English academia, discourse community of applied linguistics, generic character of conflict articles, and writer-audience relations.With the investigation of the development of different categories of criticism, mitigating strategies and degree of mitigation, the present study seeks to contribute to pragmatic research on academic writing and enrich the research on conflict discourse. Also some insight into the generic knowledge of conflict articles, as a distinct genre of academic writing, is rendered through the textual analysis of the data collected. Finally, the diachronic approach adopted in this study may be revelatory to both the stable and evolving aspects of the realization of criticism.