The representation of evaluative and argumentative procedures: examples from the academic book review article

This paper documents some of the linguistic resources used to construct evaluation and argumentation in a corpus of academic book review articles. The study investigates the discursive strategies the reviewer adopts to present his/her evaluative moves in order to highlight the discursive and argumentative dimension of the genre. Particular attention is paid to the pragmatic functions of lexicalisations of argumentative procedures, when they are used to introduce argumentative discourse. More specifically, the analysis focuses on all the reporting expressions that are associated with explicit signals of the reviewer’s positive or negative evaluation of the position of the reviewed book authors, with varying degrees of conflict or convergence. The findings reveal that the genre of the book review article finds its specificity in a combination of evaluative language and reporting. Reporting the ideas an author discusses in his or her book can be thus seen as a point of departure for the reviewer’s development of an evaluative discourse, particularly in sequences where the reviewed author’s reported opinions are presented in a kind of argumentative dialogue that helps the reviewer illustrate his/her views. The reviewer’s argumentative evaluation thus becomes a major element in the representation of the ideas under discussion. Although the most common and generally accepted interpretation of argumentative dialogue is that of a dialogue between an (active) Proponent and a (passive) Evaluator, the analysis shows that evaluation, whether realised explicitly or in subtle and implicit forms, plays an important role in the kind of dialogue that the reviewer and the reviewed author construct around specific arguments.