A Corpus-based Investigation of Metadiscourse in Academic Book Reviews

Academic book reviews published in academic journals are expected to provide readers with both positive and negative evaluation of the book under review. This academic genre has recently been the focus of increasing number of studies due to its evaluative and interactional nature. The present cross-cultural study aimed to explore how interpersonal metadiscourse was used in Turkish and English book reviews. The corpus used in this study consisted of 150 published book reviews from different disciplines in English and Turkish. In order to understand how writers engaged in their reviews and interacted with their readers, Hyland's (2000) metadiscourse model was used to identify interpersonal markers in book reviews. With a focus of five common features from this model, hedges, emphatics (boosters), attitude markers, relational markers, and person markers were used as categories to be investigated. Relying on a quantitative data analysis followed by qualitative analysis, it was found that the total number of interpersonal metadiscourse features was considerably higher in the English corpus than in the Turkish corpus. Two languages showed variations particularly in the use of hedging devices which help writers to tone down their statements. Particularly learners in academic contexts can gain awareness of how various academic genres are realized in different cultures based on the findings.