Appraisal resources in book reviews

Abstract

This cross-disciplinary and cross-linguistic/cross-cultural study intends to explore how interpersonal meaning is constructed in published Turkish and English academic book reviews (BR). To identify interpersonal meaning in the target BRs, it draws on the analytical and theoretical framework of Appraisal (Martin & White, 2005) within Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). This tripartite system includes attitude, engagement and graduation as main levels of evaluative resources and this study aims to answer how academic book reviewers employ appraisal resources of attitude in Turkish and English BRs. In addition, how appraisal resources of attitude (with its sub-resources of affect, judgment, and appreciation) are distributed in the target disciplines in these BRs. The specialized BR corpora collected for this study were comprised of 191 Turkish (283,208 words) and 194 English (280,224 words) book reviews from each of the ten disciplines: Educational Sciences (ES), History (HS), Law (LAW), Language (LN), Literature (LIT), Medical Sciences (MED), Philosophy (PH), Political Sciences (POL), Sociology (SOC), and Theology (THEO). The identification and annotation of appraisal resources in TBRs and EBRs was performed by an intensive annotation of each text individually UAM (Universidad Autonoma de Madrid) Corpus Tool. The findings reveal that overall English BRs had more appraisal resources (57% in English and 42% for Turkish) for attitude resources. The detailed analysis of each resource type revealed that in English book reviews it was more common to find expressions revealing reviewers' own opinions of how they felt about the book, and the value they gave to the book. In addition, English BRs provided more information on how the book can/cannot contribute to the field, society, and potential readers, which was one of the most vital purposes of book reviewing. In regards to disciplinary differences, it was found that Law was observed to have the most appraisal resources among all of the disciplines in both languages, which shows that this field is heavily evaluative when compared to other fields such as Educational Sciences and Literature, which had the least appraisal resources in both of the languages. The study can contribute to cross-linguistic studies in academic genre by showing how interpersonal meaning and authorial voice are constructed in a particular sub-genre of academic book reviews in two different languages. It can also provide bases for further investigation of appraisal resources in different genres and languages since it provides an elaborate list of all resources found both in Turkish and English BRs. © Peter Lang GmbH Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften Frankfurt am Main 2017. All rights reserved.