The boundaries of (anti-)politeness in the speech genre of scientific review

The article examines scholarly reviews in terms of communicative categories of politeness and antipoliteness, as well as the strategies associated with them. It offers a generalized description of the scholarly review as a speech genre, highlighting key parameters for analyzing (anti-)politeness: the roles of participants, communicative-pragmatic relations between them, and the conflict potential inherent in the critical evaluation of another scholar’s work. The authors propose adapting G. Leech’s maxims, which align with the communicative category of politeness, to the genre of scientific reviews and introduce five specific principles: the maxim of constructive criticism, the maxim of academic respect, the maxim of impartiality, the maxim of scholarly dialogue, and the maxim of academic support. Through the analysis of empirical data, four primary antipoliteness strategies in scientific reviews are identified: direct discrediting of the reviewed work, undermining the author’s status, destructive rhetoric, and formal discrediting. The study concludes that the boundary between politeness and anti-politeness in scholarly reviews is not rigid but rather represents a continuum influenced by factors such as genre conventions and norms, the constructiveness or destructiveness of criticism, the reviewer’s intent, and the emotional tone of the review.