Evaluation in academic review articles

This paper explores ways in which evaluation is achieved in academic book review articles in the field of linguistics. Evaluation is analysed from a lexical and discourse perspective. From a lexical perspective, evaluation can be associated with meanings inherent in individual lexical terms used by the writer to express opinion about the ‘good-ness’ or ‘bad-ness’ of actions, facts or events. The second perspective is that of evaluation as a feature of discourse. In this view, evaluation does not reside in an individual lexical term but is a category of discourse meaning which can be expressed in many different ways. This paper examines the two main functions that book review articles combine and integrate to achieve evaluation: a) reporting the ideas an author discusses in his or her book as a springboard for a wider evaluation of them and b) discussing the issues they raise and an appraisal of what this means for the community. The assumption is that in a book review article the reviewer can construct his/her own evaluations by using multiple converging voices: his own voice as well as those of other sources referred to in the text. This means that evaluative space is opened up in which the reviewer can specify him/herself as the source of a viewpoint or can cite other authors under review. One strategy by which evaluation seems to be achieved is that of comparing and contrasting these various voices.