Evaluation in English-Medium Medical Book Reviews

Authors

  • María Ángeles Alcaraz Ariza Universidad de Alicante
DOI: https://doi.org/10.6018/ijes/2011/1/137141
Keywords: book reviews, medical journals, evaluation, critical discourse analysis

Abstract

The aim of this paper is twofold: 1) to identify the evaluative speech acts, either positive or negative, contained in a corpus of 30 English-written medical book reviews published in The British Medical Journal in the period 2000-2009; 2) to analyze the linguistic-rhetorical strategies used to convey this evaluation. Our main results illustrate that various mitigating strategies are used not only to soften criticism, but also to help maintain social harmony and solidarity with the reviewees. Moreover, negative evaluation is on many occasions voiced at aspects outside the book reviewed, which would mean that apart from showing their expertise in the field tackled, book reviewers also want to discuss certain issues of their concern and to put forward their cultural background.

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Author Biography

María Ángeles Alcaraz Ariza, Universidad de Alicante

is a Tenured Lecturer in the Department of English Studies at the University of Alicante (Spain), where she teaches both undergraduate and postgraduate courses in English for Tourism. She also teaches a postgraduate course in English for Medicine and Health Sciences. She is the author of numerous research articles, conference papers and other publications on the linguistic and pragmatico-rhetorical analysis of English-, French- and Spanish-written medical discourse. In 2004 she was awarded the Horowitz Prize for her work on the pragmatics of written scholarly communication. Her recent publications include Backstage solidarity in Spanish- and English-written medical research papers: publication context and the acknowledgment paratext (Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 2009), La comunicación especializada de la medicina en español, francés e inglés: niveles professional y academico (Lebende Sprachen, 2009), Complimenting others: the case of English medical book reviews (Fachsprache, 2009), and Hidden influencers and the scholarly enterprise: a cross-linguistic study of acknowledgments in medical research articles (English for Professional and Academic Purposes, 2010).
Published
01-06-2011
How to Cite
Alcaraz Ariza, M. Ángeles. (2011). Evaluation in English-Medium Medical Book Reviews. International Journal of English Studies, 11(1), 137–153. https://doi.org/10.6018/ijes/2011/1/137141
Issue
Vol. 11 No. 1 (2011): New and Further Approaches to ESP Discourse: Genre Study in Focus
Section
Articles

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