Reporting and evaluation in English book review articles: a cross-disciplinary study

This study centres on a corpus-based analysis of reporting clauses. It focuses on English book review articles from academic journals across the disciplines of linguistics, history and economics and examines the use of that-clause complementation which project either others’ ideas or those of the reviewer. The study investigates selected reporting verbs in terms of their frequency and capability to act as clues in the representation of ‘consensus and conflict’ in the genre considered (Hunston, 2004), i.e. patterns of agreement and disagreement, as typically in the reviewers’ praise or criticism of the position of the reviewed authors. While it is expected that the consistent use of reporting verbs reflects both the characteristics of the genre and the role it plays within the scientific community, variation in their uses is explored, which may reveal characteristics of the disciplines themselves.