Strategies in academic discourse. Ed. by Elena Tognini-Bonelli and Gabriella del Lungo Camiciotti. (Studies in corpus linguistics 19.) Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2005. Pp. xi, 212. ISBN 9027222908. $126 (Hb).
Reviewed by Aleksandar Čarapić, University of Belgrade
The chapters in the collection Strategies in academic discourse were selected from contributions to the conference Evaluation in Academic Discourse held in June 2003 in Siena, Italy. The collection deals with theoretical and descriptive issues and techniques in the study of text and discourse.
In addition to the introduction written by Elena Tognini-Bonelli, the collection contains thirteen chapters. Ch. 1, ‘Conflict and consensus’ by Susan Hunston, focuses on the ‘conflict article’ as academic subgenre. Ch. 2, ‘Subjective or objective evaluation?’ by Julia Bamford, considers expressions of academics’ positions in argumentation, looking at the expressions of (un)certainty in lectures. Ch. 3, ‘Aspects of identification and position in intertextual reference in PhD theses’ by Paul Thompson, investigates the complexity of averral and attribution in a corpus of Ph.D. theses. Ch. 4, ‘Authorial presence in academic genres’ by Céline Poudat and Sylvain Loiseau, considers different styles of authorial presence in linguistics and philosophy, focusing particularly on personal pronouns in French. Ch. 5, ‘Pragmatic force in biology papers written by British and Japanese scientists’ by Akiko Okamura, analyzes types and tenses of verbs employing the pronoun we in British and Japanese scientists’ research articles in English. Ch. 6, ‘Evaluation and pragmatic markers’ by Karin Aijmer, focuses on the properties of indexicality and heteroglossia to explain the multifunctionality of pragmatic markers.
Ch. 7, ‘This seems somewhat counterintuitive, though …’ by Ute Römer, considers the ways in which book reviewers make negative evaluations, and examines systematic differences in reviews based on the gender of the reviewer. Ch. 8, ‘Is evaluation structure-bound?’ by Lorena Suárez-Tejerina, focuses on academic book reviews, considering the reviews in her corpus in toto, and approaches the question of how evaluation relates to the structure of the review. Ch. 9, ‘From corpus to register’ by Maria Freddi, deals with partial overlap between expressions of evaluation and argumentation in academic discourse. Ch. 10, ‘On the boundaries between evaluation and metadiscourse’ by Annelie Ädel, deals with the distinction between evaluation and metadiscourse. Ch. 11, ‘Language as a string of beads’ by John M. Sinclair, focuses on metadiscourse, which he considers a misleading term. Ch. 12, ‘Academic vocabulary in academic discourse’ by David Oakey, describes the application of the results of vocabulary research to a problem faced by nonnative English speaking students of economics in the UK. In Ch. 13, ‘Evaluation and its discontents’, Wolfgang Teubert completes the collection with a wide-ranging argument about the contrasts between language as a mental versus social phenomenon.
One of the strengths of Strategies in academic discourse is the number of spoken and written corpora used from discourses in agriculture, (applied) linguistics, biology, economics, literature, and philosophy. Though the quality among individual chapters varies, as a whole they successfully combine corpus linguistics, discourse and text linguistics, and genre-analytical and pragmatic frameworks to weave together a variety of studies of academic discourse into a coherent and solid collection. The book also provides insightful views and new directions in the study of not just academic but other discourses as well.