| Academic book review is one category of book reviews.A book review is to evaluate the contents of a certain books,which includes both positive evaluation and negative evaluation.In recent years,more and more scholars pay attention to academic book reviews studies of evaluation system,generic structure and features,and the studies from the perspective of functional linguistics,but they have seldom attached importance to the studies of academic book reviews from the perspective of pragmatics.Furthermore,the subjective factors involved in these studies are relatively large.Writing a book review is inherently a kind of face threatening act and the study on academic book reviews is bound to involve the use of mitigation strategies for politeness.Therefore,based on previous studies,this study aims to discuss the similarities and differences in the use of mitigation strategies in English and Chinese academic book reviews in a corpus approach.Corpus linguistics is a research method focusing on language performance,which is a relatively new trend of language research.It becomes more and more common to use corpora for language research,but there are relatively few pragmatic studies based on corpora due to contextual factors.Over a long period of time,pragmatics and corpus linguistics are regarded as two separate disciplines.But in recent years,linguists begin to explore the connection between the two,which opens a new door to corpus pragmatics.In order to explore the similarities and differences of the use of politeness strategies between English and Chinese academic book reviews,a corpus is built based on 164 academic book reviews that are downloaded from English and Chinese linguistic journals online.A comparative study of politeness strategies between English and Chinese book reviews is made by a method integrating qualitative and quantitative analysis.This study finds that some similar mitigation strategies for politeness are used in English and Chinese academic book reviews,which include praise-criticism strategy,praise-suggestion strategy,criticism-praise strategy,criticism-suggestion strategy and hedging.However,there are some differences in the uses of some mitigation strategies for politeness.Firstly,informal but direct criticism words are often used in English academic book reviews,while the formal but indirect words are more frequent in Chinese academic book reviews.Secondly,in the use of personal pronouns,English book reviewers usually use first-person singulars,while the Chinese ones prefer to use plural forms of first personal pronouns.Compared with English book reviewers,Chinese book reviewers will never address the author by name.Lastly,English academic book reviewers usually point out the weaknesses of books directly,but Chinese book reviewers use milder tones in the expression of negative comments,so the degree of politeness is higher than that of English book reviewers.However,the data suggest that some differences are gradually less prominent as indicated by the similar frequency of general politeness strategies in English and Chinese academic book reviews.It deserves further study.In summary,this thesis attempts to make a comparative analysis of the use of politeness strategies between English and Chinese academic book reviews by means of a self-built corpus.Through this study,we can know the similarities and differences in the use of politeness strategies between English and Chinese academic book reviews as well as their cultural differences.The differences can be attributed to the different thinking orientation and thinking pattern between English-speaking countries and China.English people have obvious individual orientation and they lay great emphasis on individual thinking.However,the tradition of Chinese people is group orientation and they pay more attention to overall thinking.Different cultures result in different cultural values and different language use.To some extent,the present study expands previous studies.It is hoped that this study can help provide more insights on the differences of language expressions between English and Chinese,and cultural differences between English-speaking countries and China as well. |
PDF Full Text Request