Выражение критики в академических рецензиях советского и постсоветского периодов (на материале рецензий журнала «Вопросы языкознания») (original) (raw)

Выражение критики в академических рецензиях советского и постсоветского периодов (на материале рецензий журнала «Вопросы языкознания»)

The study of academic genres, especially academic book reviews, has been gaining relevance during the last thirty years. The analysis of book reviews includes description of their compositional and semantic features, as well as comparison of book reviews of different fields of study, cultural communities, and time periods. The present paper investigates how criticism is expressed in academic book reviews of the 1980-s and the 2010-s in one of the most reputable Russian linguistic periodicals, Issues in Linguistics (Voprosy Jazykoznanija). To make the data comparable several additional criteria were introduced: only the reviews on monographs where both the author and the reviewer are from the same (Soviet or Russian) academic community were selected. Critical attitude in the paper is defined in terms of ‘critical acts’, which are instances of criticism targeted at different aspects of the book under review. First, the number of negative critical acts was recorded. Next, I calculated a) the proportion of criticism in the whole text, b) the targets of critical acts, c) the instances of hedging and intensification of evaluation for every book review. Finally, they were classified and analyzed, and the soviet and modern periods were compared. The results indicate that instances of both criticism and its intensification are more frequent in the modern reviews, while the reviews of the 1980-s tend to be less critical in general. The use of mitigation devices has also changed, although slightly, over time, while the means of intensification of criticism hasn’t undergone significant changes. What is more, although direct critical acts are more frequent in the 2010-s than in the 1980-s, most critical acts are hedged in both periods.