A Comparative Study On Interpersonal Meaning Of Hedging Praise In English And Chinese Academic Book Reviews

Hedging has been applied to almost all fields of social life,such as business negotiation,news,advertisement,daily communication and so on.Academic book reviews are of no exception.As a style of transmission and evaluation of other studies,academic book reviews not only provide a channel for reviewers,but also are an important basis for readers to choose their desirable books.Through the use of hedging praise,academic book reviewers,on the one hand,show the value recognition of books and promote them to the potential readers.On the other hand,academic book reviewers interact with the original authors and the potential readers,which realizes certain interpersonal functions.Therefore,the interpersonal meaning of hedging praise in English and Chinese academic book reviews deserves a wide attention.The theories used in this study are Halliday's Systemic Functional Grammar and Martin's Appraisal Theory.Interpersonal function,as one of the three metafunctions of Systemic Functional Grammar,refers to the use of mood and modality in speech activities to achieve communicative goals.The Appraisal Theory inherits and develops the Systemic Functional Grammar to express the attitude,appreciation and judgment of things through different language resources.This study builds a corpus with 25 English and Chinese academic book reviews respectively,which have been published in authoritative journals about linguistics and applied linguistics from 2013 to 2017.And under qualitative and quantitative research methods,this study aims to comparatively analyze the interpersonal meanings of hedging praise in English and Chinese academic book reviews and intends to answer the following questions:(1)What are the frequency and distribution features of hedging praise in English and Chinese academic book reviews? What are the similarities and the differences?(2)What linguistic forms are used to represent hedging praise in English and Chinese academic book reviews? What are the similarities and the differences?(3)In what ways the application of hedging praise conveys interpersonal meanings in English and Chinese academic book reviews? What are the similarities and the differences?Research findings are as follows: Firstly,English and Chinese academic book reviews both contain rich hedging praise,which is mainly distributed in the evaluation part and is represented by linguistic forms of mood,modality and appraisal.Secondly,in order to increase objectivity and reliability,third person is used more frequently than first person and second person in both English and Chinese academic book reviews.Thirdly,both English and Chinese academic book reviews use more modalization than modulation to prevent the promotion of the reviewed books from being too absolute.Fourthly,in both English andChinese academic book reviews,more force resources than focus resources are used to draw readers into the reviewers' value standpoints to the maximum extent.There are also differences in the use of hedging praise in English and Chinese academic book reviews.Firstly,although both English and Chinese academic book reviewers want to maintain a harmonious relationship with the original authors and readers,English academic book reviewers prefer to use modality of median value,while Chinese academic book reviewers tend to use modality of low value.Secondly,English academic book reviewers use more dialogic expansion resources,while Chinese academic book reviewers apply more dialogic contraction resources.It indicates that English academic book reviewers tend to make more allowances for dialogically alternative voices,while Chinese academic book reviewers' voices are more likely to compress “the” other voices and claim authoritative stances in their evaluation.