A genre-based approach to analysing academic review articles

Using a genre-based approach, this paper investigates the rhetorical structure of academic book review articles and focuses on what is the most important move in this genre, that is proving praise and/or criticism of the reviewed book. The study looks at how evaluative discourse structures are shaped to achieve meaning and purpose, particularly inside this move. In contrast to what may be expected, the analysis reveals that criticism is expressed rather straightforwardly in the genre, with varying degrees of intensity, one of the most recurrent ways of expressing it being based on the usage of contrastive structures embedding both criticism and praise for the reviewed book.