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Attitude Resources in Turkish Academic Book Reviews

Summary/Abstract: Book reviews play a significant role in facilitating academic communication and constructing scientific knowledge (Hyland, 2000). As texts that explicitly evaluate books, incorporating both praise and critique, book reviews are crucial in identifying discipline-specific values and interpersonal communication strategies, thereby serving as an important source in academic discourse (Miranda, 1996). This study, grounded in scientific discourse, aims to explore the types of attitude resources utilized in expressions of praise and critique in Turkish academic book reviews within the fields of Social Sciences and Natural Sciences. By doing so, the study seeks to uncover the discourse habits and preferred attitudes of academic writers across different disciplines. To date, Turkish academic research has largely focused on research articles, leaving book reviews underexplored. This study endeavors to fill this gap by examining Turkish book reviews within the framework of scientific discourse, with the aim of contributing to an understanding of the evaluative criteria employed in these reviews, an area that has not yet been sufficiently addressed in Turkish academic literature. The theoretical framework of the study is based on Martin and White’s (2005) Appraisal Theory. Appraisal Theory examines interpersonal meaning in texts through three key domains of evaluation: engagement, attitude, and graduation. This study focuses on the use of attitude resources in Turkish academic book reviews. The corpus of the study consists of 30 book reviews published between 2000 and 2018 in the fields of Social Sciences (Linguistics, History, Turkish Language and Literature) and Natural Sciences (Science Education, Statistics, Mathematics) selected through a random sampling method. A content analysis method based on text analysis was employed in the study. The book reviews in the fields of Social Sciences and Natural Sciences were compared to evaluate field-dependent differences. The findings indicate that positive appreciation resources dominate Turkish academic book reviews, whereas judgment and affect resources are used in a limited manner. In terms of the fields, in the Social Sciences, affective expressions are scarcely employed, judgment resources contain only positive evaluations, and appreciation resources are predominantly positive. In the Natural Sciences, affective expressions are positive, judgment resources are absent, and appreciation resources exhibit a largely positive distribution. This suggests that the texts predominantly employ a language of praise, with a lack of critical perspective.

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