A framework for comparing evaluation resources across academic texts

Abstract

The use of evaluation resources has proven to be an especially difficult area in English for Academic Purposes. Our aim is to propose a methodological framework for identifying recurrent differences in the use of evaluation resources in academic texts across English and other languages. We argue that for comparisons to be meaningful, studies of independent but comparable successful texts should contrast propositions that are similar in terms of their pragmatic or discourse function. We narrow the focus of the proposal down to the academic book review genre in one particular academic discipline and argue for the contrast of propositions functioning as critical acts on similar things, the academic books under review. We reason that for fruitful comparisons it would be necessary to distinguish between evaluation resources occurring on the propositional, metadiscoursal, and rhetorical planes. We discuss the types of evaluation resources that occur on these three planes in a corpus of twenty recent literary academic book reviews in English. We conclude that applying this framework to the quantitative analysis of comparable texts and propositions across languages would help to establish the extent to which the use of evaluation resources varies as a function of the language in a useful way.