Praise and blame in academic discourse: A case of content-related evaluation in book reviews

The presented article looks at the expression of positive and negative evaluation related to the content of the book under review in two corpora of academic book reviews obtained from linguistics and psychology academic journals spanning the years 2008 – 2018. The overall aim has been to compare and contrast instances of evaluative meaning from two related but not entirely identical fields of knowledge. An analysis such as this one has not yet been attempted to perform on a corpus of academic books from these two disciplines only. The study has used the UAM (Universidad Autonoma de Madrid) Corpus Tool software (O'Donnell 2008) with the view to providing answers as to whether there exist disciplinary variations in the frequency and distribution of positive and negative evaluative acts related to the parameter of CONTENT in the two corpora under analysis. The findings indicate that reviewers from linguistics and psychology choose to implement somewhat different strategies in managing praise and blame concerning content-oriented meanings, respectively.