Confrontation in Academic Communication 3031327357, 9783031327353

Table of contents :
Acknowledgments
Contents
About the Author
List of Graphs
List of Tables
Chapter 1: Introduction
References
Chapter 2: Aim and Methodology of the Study
2.1 Aim of the Study
2.2 Methodological Approaches
2.2.1 Contrastive Rhetoric: “Beyond Texts”
2.2.2 Context-Based Versus Corpus-Based Methods
2.3 Methodology Employed in the Study
2.4 Corpora
References
Chapter 3: Confrontation in Academic Communication: Theoretical Background
3.1 Evaluation in Academic Communication
3.2 Criticism: Critique–Negative Evaluation—Confrontation in Academic Communication
3.3 Culture: Disciplinary Culture—Community of Practice
References
Chapter 4: The Academic Book Review
4.1 Introductory Remarks
4.2 Definitions and Basic Features
4.3 The Reviewer
4.4 Structure and Formal Characteristics of the Academic Book Review
4.5 Aims of the Study and Data
4.6 Methodology
4.7 Results
4.7.1 Premises
4.7.2 Topoi
4.8 Concluding Remarks
References
Chapter 5: The ‘Academic War’: A Case Study
5.1 Aim and Material of the Case Study
5.2 Methodology of the Investigation
5.3 Chronological Development of the ‘Academic War’ Around Critical Discourse Analysis
5.4 General Statistical Data
5.5 Premises
5.6 Topoi
5.7 Analysis of Critical Argumentation Schemes
5.7.1 Critical Argumentation Schemes: Overview
5.7.2 Types of Critical Argumentation Schemes
5.8 Concluding Remarks
References
Chapter 6: Confrontation and the Academic Discourse Community Revisited
References
Appendix
Source Texts
Chapter 4: The Academic Book Review
German Reviews
English Reviews (Also Used in Chap. 5: The ‘Academic War’—A Case Study)
Index

Citation preview

Confrontation in Academic Communication

Irena Vassileva

Confrontation in Academic Communication

Irena Vassileva

Confrontation in Academic Communication

Irena Vassileva Foreign Languages and Cultures New Bulgarian University Sofia, Bulgaria

ISBN 978-3-031-32735-3    ISBN 978-3-031-32736-0 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-32736-0 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover pattern © John Rawsterne/patternhead.com This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgments

My thanks are due, first and foremost, to the Bulgarian National Science Fund, whose generous financial support gave me the unique opportunity to conduct research on the present project in the Federal Republic of Germany. I am deeply indebted to my host professor, Prof. Dr. Heinrich P.  Kelz†, from the Institute of Linguistics, Media, and Communication Sciences, University of Bonn, for his encouragement, helpful suggestions, and immense patience, as well as to all colleagues at the institute, whose kindness and support were immeasurable. I am also extremely grateful to all my Bulgarian colleagues, as well as to the two anonymous reviewers of Palgrave Macmillan, for their valuable constructive criticism. Last but not least, special thanks to my family for their understanding and moral support during the realization of this project. The responsibility for any shortcomings, errors, and omissions rests with me alone.

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Contents

1 Introduction  1 2 Aim and Methodology of the Study  7 3 Confrontation  in Academic Communication: Theoretical Background 15 4 The Academic Book Review  33 5 The ‘Academic War’: A Case Study  71 6 Confrontation  and the Academic Discourse Community Revisited105 Appendix109 Index113

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About the Author

Irena  Vassileva is Professor of English and German Linguistics at the New Bulgarian University, Sofia, Bulgaria. She holds the academic degree of Dr. Phil. Habil. from the Philological Faculty of the University of Leipzig, Germany. Vassileva is author of Author-Audience Interaction. A Cross-Cultural Perspective (2006), Academic Discourse Rhetoric and the Bulgarian – English Interlanguage (2002), Who Is the author? (A Contrastive Analysis of Authorial Presence in English, German, French, Russian and Bulgarian Academic Discourse (2000), as well as of a number of articles in international peer-reviewed journals. She is co-editor of The Digital Scholar: Academic Communication in Multimedia Environment (Forum für Fachsprachen-Forschung, vol. 153) (2020). Irena Vassileva’s international experience includes: two Research Group Linkage Programme group projects financed by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Germany (“Text Plagiarism in the Social Sciences vis-à-vis Ethical Aspects and Common Practices”—2017–2018, and “Academic Communication in Multimedia Environments”—2013–2016), several research fellowships from the same foundation (2016, 2012, 2001–2003, 1998–2000), as well as research fellowships from the Open Society Fund (2000–2003, 1996–1998), from the Canadian government (2009), Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Diesnt (German Academic Exchange Service) (DAAD) (1997), and European Economic Area (EEA) (2010, 2012). She also worked as a senior research fellow, Research Project “Digital Dictionary of German Collocations,” at the Berlin-­Brandenburg Academy of Sciences, Berlin, Germany (2003–2004). Vassileva has taught on various programs at two Bulgarian universities, at the University of Bonn, Germany, as well as at six UK universities. ix

List of Graphs

Graph 4.1 Graph 4.2 Graph 4.3 Graph 4.4 Graph 5.1 Graph 5.2 Graph 5.3

Content- and form-based premises in German Content- and form-based premises in English Topoi in German book reviews Topoi in English book reviews Distribution of the premises Frequency of the topoi Types of argumentation schemes

57 57 59 59 78 79 85

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List of Tables

Table 5.1 Table 5.2 Table 5.3

Overall length of articles Length of articles per author in chronological order Number of critical argumentation schemes for each author in chronological order

77 77 84

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Abstract  Most of the existing studies assume that, owing to the predominantly evolutionary nature of the development of science, collaborative rhetoric is intrinsic to academic discourse and criticism is an exception rather than the rule. This is most probably the reason why there is relatively little research done on the topic. At the same time, the issue has become extremely relevant and worth exploring in the era of globalization and the ensuing constantly increasing competition and struggle for power and high esteem among scholars from all over the world, whose number is not only greater than ever, but they also represent countries and academic cultures that have remained hitherto isolated from the mainstream (Western) academia. The question has been approached from disciplinary, cross-disciplinary, cross-cultural as well as historical perspectives, but practically all investigations have been based on socio-pragmatic theories and discuss the problems within speech act and politeness strategies frameworks. The expression of criticism may take various forms and may be based on different premises—theoretical assumptions, methodological failures, relevance of data, practical application of research results, terminological problems, etc. With the development of a long-lasting conflict, however, the argumentation strategies and, respectively, the language used, tend to sharpen and to change their orientation from purely content-centred to personality-centred and to move away from truly scientific debates.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 I. Vassileva, Confrontation in Academic Communication, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-32736-0_1

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Keywords  Academic communication • Academic criticism • Confrontation • Book review Although nobody would deny that academic criticism and confrontation are inherent features of academic communication, most of the existing studies assume that, owing to the predominantly evolutionary nature of the development of science, collaborative rhetoric is intrinsic to academic discourse and criticism is an exception rather than the rule. This is most probably the reason why there is relatively little research done on the topic. At the same time, the issue has become extremely relevant and worth exploring in the era of globalization and the ensuing constantly increasing competition and struggle for power and high esteem among scholars from all over the world, whose number is not only greater than ever, but they also represent countries and academic cultures that have remained hitherto isolated from the mainstream (Western) academia. The question has been approached from disciplinary, cross-disciplinary, cross-cultural as well as historical perspectives, but practically all investigations have been based on socio-pragmatic theories and discuss the problems within speech act and politeness strategies frameworks. Thus, linguists have tried to find out what linguistic means are used in order to exercise or avoid criticism—vague language, hedging, boosting, among others (i.e., Knapp-Potthoff, 1992; Pagano, 1994; Pätzold, 1984; Hyland, 2004, 2005, 2008; Hunston, 2005; Hyland & Diani, 2009; Tse & Hyland, 2009; Wang & Nelson, 2012). Sociologists, on the other hand, regard academic criticism mainly as an expression of the ever-increasing competitiveness for professional recognition in the modern world (Hutz, 2001; Wiegand, 1983). Basically, there exist two contradictory views on the role of academic confrontation, which I would like to dwell on here in short without siding with any of them: Firstly, confrontation in academic communication is considered to be dangerous and unproductive: Ventola (1998, p. 290), in one of the first contrastive studies on the issue, criticizes viciously the employment of dismissive rhetorical strategies: “Confrontative strategies are dangerous games, just as wars are. This kind of dialogue is as destructive as bombs.” Further in the same article (ibid., p. 292) she also maintains that:

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Often we hear the claim that it is the issues, not the people that are in confrontative positions in academic writing. In my view, however, it appears that in our writing at least we very frequently seem to forget this, and our writing about the theories of others often becomes extremely personal and attacking.

Another strong proponent of this view, Tannen (2002, p. 1655), claims that disagreement in academic discourse is supported by certain standard requirements of modern scientific communication: “A common framework for academic papers […] prescribes that authors position their work in opposition to someone else’s, which they then prove wrong” and further explains that the ideology behind this requirement is ‘critical thinking’ that, in spite of its much wider scope, tends to be interpreted as a necessity to resort to “exclusively negative criticism” (p. 1658). Her position is: There is much wrong with the metaphorical assignment of research to warring camps. It obscures the aspects of disparate work that overlap and can learn from each other. It obscures the complexity of research. […] Most scholars are not wrong in what they assert but in what they deny. (Ibid., p. 1661)

Secondly, confrontation in academic communication is regarded as providing impetuses for advance and further development: Following Wunderlich (1972, p.  318), confrontation and collisions should not be viewed as exclusively negative communication strategies on the part of authors aiming only at playing down the achievements of others in order to gain more power and prestige, but should also be treated as a necessary prerequisite for the evolutionary development of science. Besides, Knapp-Potthoff (1992, p. 203) points out that in international scientific communication “more so than in other types of communication, face-threatening acts and their redress do not operate on the inter-­ individual level alone, but – by process of attribution and stereotyping – tend to have consequences for higher levels of social organization as well.” As will be seen later in this study, the latter statement holds true for whole groups of scholars or ‘schools’ consisting of followers united by their adherence to the same theoretical and/or methodological framework, who form subject-related discourse communities, so that if one scholar is attacked, the others feel themselves threatened as well and react immediately in defence of the ‘victim,’ which on its part provokes a

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‘counter-attack’ from the other party. In some cases, such confrontative exchanges go on for decades and eventually turn into ‘a static battle of attrition’ where ‘victory’ seems to be equally unapproachable for both parties involved. The expression of criticism may take various forms and may be based on different premises— theoretical assumptions, methodological failures, relevance of data, practical application of research results, terminological problems, etc. With the development of a long-lasting conflict, however, the argumentation strategies and, respectively, the language used, tend to sharpen and to change their orientation from purely content-centred to personality-centred and to move away from truly scientific debates (see Chap. 5). All these features have brought about the necessity to make use of military terminology in order to best describe the state of affairs, of course, in metaphorical terms. It has to be pointed out here that confrontation in academia is not a new phenomenon at all; it used to be even more pronounced at the onset of modern science sometime in the seventeenth century. Without going into details, I should note, however, that the type of confrontation to be discussed in the present study is basically typical of the soft disciplines where, in contrast to the hard ones, argumentation is predominantly of verbal character, since experiences and phenomena are rarely strictly measurable, and their analysis is thus of a much more interpretive nature. Therefore, as Hyland (2005, p. 188) puts it, Writers are far less able to rely on general understandings and on the acceptance of proven quantitative methods to establish their claims and this increases the need for more explicit evaluation and engagement. Personal credibility, and explicitly getting behind arguments, play a far greater part in creating a convincing discourse for these writers.

Hence, soft disciplines scholars are forced to rely much more on language and rhetoric than on other (for instance visual) semiotic means containing data, respectively evidence, such as graphs, tables, charts, etc., for the presentation of their results, views, and convictions, which on its part leads to exploitation of rhetorical resources that may sometimes go beyond the generally accepted boundaries of what is considered to be ‘ethical’ in academic communication. This is the main reason why I opted to take a closer look at the language of linguists who are, moreover, expected to be fully aware of the

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effects of their writing and argumentation strategies on their discourse community and on the further development of the field as a whole. Following this short introduction, I shall briefly summarize the structure of the book. Chapter 2 explicates the aim and methodology of the study, namely, to elucidate the argumentation strategies employed by linguists in voicing criticism, to look for some explanations for confrontation in academic discourse, and to evaluate the positive and/or negative effects it has on international academic communication. Issues such as the role of intertextuality, cross-cultural variations, the notion of ‘academic discourse community,’ among others, are also touched upon. Special attention is paid in this chapter to the modern developments in contrastive rhetoric studies, as well as to the controversial issue of the use of context-based versus corpus-based methods. Chapter 2 also describes the corpora the investigation is based on, namely academic book reviews in English and German, and a series of publications in English interrelated by the fact that they discuss a common group of problems but from two fully confrontative points of view. They illustrate what I have called an ‘academic war.’ Chapter 3 deals with some theoretical issues related to the areas of interest of the study: the role of evaluation in academic communication, the relationship among criticism, critique, negative evaluation, and confrontation in academic communication, as well as the importance of culture, discipline culture, and community of practice. Chapter 4 uses the methodology of contrastive discourse analysis where the languages envisaged are English and German. The methodological apparatus for the analysis of academic book reviews in the two languages is the classical Aristotelian theory of argumentation. Chapter 5 focuses on the above-mentioned ‘academic war’ and deals with review articles only in English. Here, the modern theory of argumentation schemes is used, which makes both the results and the applicability of the different approaches comparable with those in the previous Chap. 4. The original idea of including German sources as well could not be realized since no such ‘academic wars’ could be found in that language and academic culture. Chapter 6 servers as a conclusion and sums up the results of the study, at the same time bringing up some theoretical issues and putting them in new light in view of the obtained results.

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References Hunston, S. (2005). Conflict and consensus: Construing opposition in applied linguistics. In E. Tognini-Bonelli & G. del Lungo Camiciotti (Eds.), Strategies in academic discourse (pp. 1–15). John Benjamins. Hutz, M. (2001). “Insgesamt muss ich leider zu einem ungünstigen Urteil kommen.” Zur Kulturspezifik wissenschaftlicher Rezensionen im Deutschen und Englischen. In U.  Fix, et  al. (Eds.), Zur Kulturspezifik von Textsorten (pp. 109–130). Stauffenburg Verlag. Hyland, K. (2004). Disciplinary discourses, Michigan classics ed.: Social interactions in academic writing. University of Michigan Press. Hyland, K. (2005). Stance and engagement: A model of interaction in academic discourse. Discourse Studies, 7(2), 173–192. SAGE Publications. Hyland, K. (2008). Academic clusters: Text patterning in published and postgraduate writing. International Journal of Applied Linguistics, 18(1), 41–62. Hyland, K., & Diani, G. (2009). Academic evaluation. Review genres in university settings. Palgrave Macmillan. Knapp-Potthoff, A. (1992). Secondhand politeness. In R. J. Watts et al. (Eds.), Politeness in language (pp. 203–220). Mouton de Gruyter. Pagano, A. (1994). Negatives in written texts. In M. Coulthard (Ed.), Advances in written text analysis (pp. 250–265). Routledge. Pätzold, J. (1984). Beschreibung und Erwerb von Handlungsmustern. Beispiel: Rezensionen wissenschaftlicher Publikationen. Akademie der Wissenschaften der DDR. Reihe A. Arbeitsberichte 138. Tannen, D. (2002). Agonism in academic discourse. Journal of Pragmatics, 34, 1651–1669. Tse, P., & Hyland, K. (2009). Discipline and gender: Constructing rhetorical identity in book reviews. In K. Hyland & G. Diani (Eds.), Academic evaluation: Review genres in university settings (pp. 105–121). Palgrave Macmillan. Ventola, E. (1998). Meaningful choices in academic communities. Ideological issues. In R. Schulze (Ed.), Making meaningful choices in English (pp. 277–294). Gunter Narr. Wang, Y., & Nelson, M. (2012). Discursive construction of authorial voice in English book reviews: A contrastive analysis. Hong Kong Journal of Applied Linguistics, 14(1), 1–24. Wiegand, H.  E. (1983). Nachdenken über wissenschaftliche Rezensionen. Deutsche Sprache, 11, 122–137. Wunderlich, D. (1972). Zur Konventionalität von Sprechhandlungen. In D. Wunderlich (Ed.), Linguistische Pragmatik (pp. 11–58). Athenäum.

CHAPTER 2

Aim and Methodology of the Study

Abstract  This chapter explicates the aim and methodology of the study, namely, to elucidate the argumentation strategies employed by linguists in voicing criticism, to look for some explanations for confrontation in academic discourse and to evaluate the positive and/or negative effects it has on international academic communication. Issues such as the role of intertextuality, cross-cultural variations, the notion of ‘academic discourse community,’ among others, are also touched upon. Special attention is paid in this chapter to the modern developments in contrastive rhetoric studies, as well as to the controversial issue of the use of context-based versus corpus-based methods. It also describes the corpora the investigation is based on, namely academic book reviews in English and German (10 in each language), and a series of publications in English (12 – 70,771 running words) interrelated by the fact that they discuss a common group of problems but from two fully confrontative viewpoints. They illustrate what I have metaphorically called an ‘academic war.’ Keywords  Aim and methodology • Contrastive rhetoric • Context-­ based versus corpus-based methods • Corpora

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2.1   Aim of the Study The project is designed as a follow-up of my previous research on the rhetoric of cross-cultural academic communication (Vassileva, 2000, 2002, 2006, among others). The study aims to elucidate: • The argumentation strategies and their surface linguistic expression used by English- and German-speaking scholars in voicing criticism. • The degree to which this criticism is based on objective logic and/or on subjective personal evaluation • The preference for certain argumentation schemes and topoi • Cross-linguistic and cross-cultural differences • Points of conflict and misunderstandings that may result from the established differences • Explanations of the reasons for confrontation in academia • The role of intertextuality in confrontative academic exchange • Considerations of the positive, as well as the negative effects of confrontation for the advance of scientific thought • A re-definition of the notion of ‘academic discourse community’ in view of its constant expansion and the ever-increasing multiplication of voices within it due to the present-day process of globalization and the dominant role of English as a lingua franca I shall argue that the predominantly pragmatic phenomena enumerated above find their surface realization in language, but explanations should be pursued by resorting to at least several extra-linguistic spheres, as well as by considering their intricate interplay and interdependence, namely: • Dominant ideologies • General attitudes to knowledge and understandings of its role in society • Differences between the respective educational systems, for example, focus on content versus focus on form, written versus oral means of instruction and evaluation, etc. • Understanding of the relationship between the individual (author) and society (academic community/audience) • Rhetorical and stylistic traditions • Cross-cultural influences and their historical dynamics • Intra-cultural social, political, and economic developments

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The factors enumerated above do not, of course, constitute an exhaustive list, but even those are enough to demonstrate that studies in pragmatics should draw on research in philosophy, psychology (individual and social), political sciences, educational sciences, cultural studies, etc. What is more, the results of such studies, more often than not, boil down to issues such as language policy, linguistic and cultural imperialism, the use of language as an instrument for exercising power, and thus have direct impact on decision-making processes concerning current and future social practices. The results of the study could further be used to sensitize scholars’ awareness of the functions and consequences of confrontation, as well as for the creation of teaching materials for scholars—non-native speakers of the two languages involved, who use them for international communication.

2.2  Methodological Approaches Since the investigation has a primarily contrastive character, first I shall dwell upon some recent issues and new developments in the field of contrastive rhetoric. 2.2.1   Contrastive Rhetoric: “Beyond Texts” After her seminal study on “Contrastive Rhetoric” dating back to 1996, Ulla Connor (2004, p. 293) offers a comprehensive overview of the latest developments in intercultural rhetoric research. She emphasizes some changes in the paradigm and, respectively, the goals of contrastive studies, that have been “affected by two major developments, namely the expansion of genres under consideration and a [striving] to emphasize context of writing.” Regarding the latter point, she stresses the role of discourse communities in forming the disciplinary norms and expectancies of audiences in view of specific social situations. Therefore, she concludes that: Social construction of meaning as dynamic, socio-cognitive activities is a term used to describe this approach to texts. Instead of analyzing what texts mean, we want to understand how they construct meaning.

Besides, Connor (2004, p. 294) maintains that “contrastive rhetoric is not a specific method, but […] employs various methods. These methods include text analysis, genre analysis, corpus linguistics, and ethnographic approaches.”

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Concerning the establishment of tertia comparationis in contrastive investigations based on genre theory, she warns against a frequently occurring failure, namely: “in establishing tertia comparationes, we are often forced to find prototype genres, essentialize discourse communities, and belittle individual variation in the production and reception of the genres studied” (ibid., p. 298). Canagarajah (2002a, b, p. 69) claims that genre analysis contrasts with intercultural rhetoric by searching for universal generic structures while contrastive rhetoric research “adopts the relativistic orientation that writers from different cultures relate to form variously and/or that form in the same genres is realized differently in different cultures.” Swales (2004, p. 245), on the other hand, believe[s] that the weight of current evidence, at least within the circumscribed realm of research genres, leans toward a sociological rather than cultural explanations. Rather than looking for essentializing traditions such as […], we might do better to focus on writer-audience considerations.

This point of view relates closely to Connor’s (2004, p. 292) suggestion that: “Instead of focusing on products, intercultural research needs to change its focus to the processes that lead to the products.” I could not but agree with the proposal that it is necessary to concentrate on the process of knowledge creation and representation but the question arising here is: Is it possible to look only at the process and ignore the product? I believe that the two ‘ends’ of the route to the completion of the scientific product need not and should not be kept apart but rather studied simultaneously. 2.2.2   Context-Based Versus Corpus-Based Methods Commenting on the two major approaches to contrastive analysis, Connor (2004, p. 292) warns that they both have to take into consideration the variations in the definition of ‘culture,’ ranging between “static (referring to ‘big,’ ethnic cultures) to […] dynamic (often referring to ‘small’ cultures, e.g. disciplinary, classroom, local).” Swales (2004, p. 252) admits having been skeptical about the corpus-­ based approaches to genre analysis mainly due to the “strong incidentalist tendency in corpus work.” Later, however, he found out that corpora

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“were excellent for validating or invalidating statements made by other scholars about the English language, and for exemplifying patterns or structures for pedagogical purposes” (ibid., p. 253). One of the proponents and most active scholars investigating evaluation by using a corpus-based approach is Ute Römer (2008, p. 116–117, see also 2010), who claims that it is possible to investigate evaluative elements after having defined them. She admits, though, that such identification is highly challenging for researchers. Her approach is a lexico-phraseological one, where evaluative lexical elements (mainly adjectives and their pre-modifiers) are pre-defined and discussed in relation to their immediate co(n)text in the corpus. Groom (2009, p.  127) finds this deductive methodology, which “involves specifying objects for concordance analysis on an a priori basis,” “entirely feasible […] for studying some linguistic phenomena.” However, for other purposes he suggests “a more inductive, ‘corpus-driven’ approach, in which the initial process of selecting items for qualitative concordance study is delegated to a computer algorithm” (ibid., p. 128). Thus, he selects for the purpose of his 2009-study so-called ‘keywords analysis’ that “centres on the qualitative concordance analysis of a set of words which have been identified by a computational procedure as being statistically significant, or ‘key’, in a specialized corpus, when compared against a larger and more general reference corpus” (ibid., p. 128). Hyland (2008, p.  18) employs a corpus-based analysis in order “to explore the extent to which phraseology contributes to academic writing by identifying the most frequent 4-word bundles in the key genres of four disciplines” and finds out that there exist considerable differences among the disciplines in this respect.

2.3  Methodology Employed in the Study One of the initial goals of the present research was to check the feasibility and applicability to contrastive studies of both methods briefly discussed above. While Chap. 4 employs the context-based method by looking at the similarities and differences in the expression of negative evaluation in English and German academic book reviews from the point of view of the Aristotelian argumentation theory, Chap. 5 represents a case study of an ‘academic war’ and is methodologically based on modern argumentation theory (Walton et al., 2008).

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After a summary of the history of topics from Aristotle (1954) to the Amsterdam School, Walton et al. (2008, p. 307) come to the following conclusion regarding the relationship between ancient rhetoric and argumentation schemes theory: Most argument schemes derive from the dialectal and rhetorical common places, the loci. Some of them are based on logical-semantic properties and are necessarily true; others are only plausible. […] Argument schemes stem from both dialectal and rhetorical topics. They include not only semantic inferences but also places from circumstances.

The detailed descriptions of each method are presented at the beginning of the respective chapters in order to facilitate the understanding of the analyses. An attempt was also made to utilize a corpus-based method in order to compare the linguistic means of conveying negative evaluation in research articles in the two languages. However, as the examples in Chaps. 4 and 5 demonstrate, the surface expression of criticism takes various forms and may span over whole paragraphs and even longer stretches of discourse, which makes it impossible to identify key words or bundles that lend themselves to a corpus-driven analysis. Therefore, it was concluded that, at least for the time being, this approach is unable to cater for the examination of such complex discourse structures.

2.4  Corpora The investigation draws on data elicited from two types of corpora representative for the language of linguistics: 1. Academic book reviews with a definite negative character in English and German—ten for each language 2. Review articles and book reviews, including replies to reviews (12) (70,771 running words) in English that are closely related to one another topically and represent two mutually exclusive, in the authors’ opinion, schools of linguistics, where outstanding representatives of both schools ‘attack the enemies’ and ‘defend their own positions’ by (sometimes at least) using razor-sharp linguistic means of expression

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The reviews are analyzed in their entirety. The primary selection criteria were: (1) that the reviews are published in leading international journals or collections of articles (see Appendix) and (2) have a negative outcome, i.e., the reviewer concludes by not recommending the book to the readers. The practical problem encountered in the choice of the texts was the generally low number of reviews corresponding to the above criteria, as well as the fact that they had to be located by hand, combing a bulk of journals and the respective review sections, since an Internet search was not possible. The materials for illustrating and investigating an ‘academic war’ were centered on one topic, namely the pro-CDA and anti-CDA debate, and were analyzed in their order of publication.

References Aristotle. (1954). Rhetoric (W. R. Roberts, Trans.). Random House. Canagarajah, A. S. (2002a). Critical academic writing and multilingual students. University of Michigan Press. Canagarajah, A.  S. (2002b). A geopolitics of academic writing. University of Pittsburgh Press. Connor, U. (1996). Contrastive rhetoric. Cross-cultural aspects of second-language writing. Cambridge University Press. Connor, U. (2004). Intercultural rhetoric research: Beyond texts. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 3(4), 291–304. Groom, N. (2009). Phraseology and epistemology in academic book reviews: A corpus-driven analysis of two humanities disciplines. In K.  In Hyland & G.  Diani (Eds.), Academic evaluation. Review genres in university settings (pp. 122–139). Palgrave Macmillan. Hyland, K. (2008). Academic clusters: Text patterning in published and postgraduate writing. International Journal of Applied Linguistics, 18(1), 41–62. Römer, U. (2008). Identification impossible? A corpus approach to realisations of evaluative meaning in academic writing. Functions of Language, XV(1), 115–130. Römer, U. (2010). Establishing the phraseological profile of a text type. The construction of meaning in academic book reviews. English Text Construction, 3(1), 95–119. Swales, J. (2004). Research genres. Exploration and applications. Cambridge University Press. Vassileva, I. (2000). Who is the author? (a contrastive analysis of authorial presence in English, German, French, Russian and Bulgarian academic discourse). Asgard Verlag.

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Vassileva, I. (2002). Academic discourse rhetoric and the Bulgarian – English interlanguage. Tip-top Verlag. Vassileva, I. (2006). Author-audience interaction. A cross-cultural perspective. Asgard Verlag. Walton, D., Reed, C., & Macagno, F. (2008). Argumentation schemes. Cambridge University Press.

CHAPTER 3

Confrontation in Academic Communication: Theoretical Background

Abstract  This chapter deals with some theoretical issues related to the areas of interest of the study. First, the role of evaluation in academic communication is discussed by looking at two contradictory, even mutually exclusive assumptions as to the very existence of evaluation in language: (1) ‘Every utterance is evaluative’ and (2) ‘Not all utterances are evaluative.’ Various approaches to the investigation of evaluation have been critically examined. Second, in order to elucidate the essence and function of confrontation in academic communication, some basic notions closely related to it are clarified, namely: criticism, critique, negative evaluation, and confrontation in academic communication, as well as the relationship among them. Finally, the importance of culture, discipline culture, and community of practice are addressed, and it is concluded that if one remains committed to the traditional understanding of ‘discourse community,’ one should either recognize the existence of a very large number of very small communities (of practice) or accept that the academic discourse community has disappeared. A more realistic point of view would be to speak at present of fluctuating communities united by temporary common goals. Keywords  Evaluation in academic communication • Criticism, critique, negative evaluation, confrontation • Culture, discipline culture, community of practice

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 I. Vassileva, Confrontation in Academic Communication, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-32736-0_3

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3.1   Evaluation in Academic Communication Since the realization of confrontative strategies in academic communication is directly related to, and actually part of the realization of evaluation in general, I shall start with a short overview of the various understandings of this notion in recent linguistics literature. Without going into details and recounting all publications dealing with evaluation, I should still mention the fact that, like in many other cases in this ‘soft’ science, there exist two contradictory, even mutually exclusive assumptions as to the very existence of evaluation in language: 1. Every utterance is evaluative Hyland and Diani (2009, p. 4) gives a succinct overview of the various approaches and terminological apparatuses used in the study of evaluation and concludes that: The term ‘evaluation’ itself originates in the work of Hunston (1994; Hunston and Thompson, 2000). Despite differences among these terms, they all take up by Stubbs’ (1996, p. 197) point that ‘whenever speakers (or writers) say anything, they encode their attitude towards it.’

Thompson and Hunston (2000, p.  5) define evaluation as a “broad cover term for the expression of the speaker or writer’s attitude or stance towards, viewpoint on, or feelings about the entities or propositions that he or she is talking about.” This belief, however, dates back at least to Vološinov (1973, p. 105): “No utterance can be put together without value judgement. Every utterance is above all an evaluative orientation. Therefore, each element in a living utterance not only has a meaning but also has a value” [emphasis in original]. 2. Not all utterances are evaluative In his investigation of academic book reviews Shaw (2004, p.  121) states: “I am claiming that there are acts in book reviews which do not evaluate the book on this dimension, but describe it.” Further on, he maintains that there is a scale of explicitness for evaluation where it is not always clear whether a term is used positively or negatively. The interpretation is often based on “extratextual knowledge” (ibid., p. 128),

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as well as on the examination of a wider context/co-text. As an example, Shaw (2004, p.  127) refers to “negated clauses or other constructions with grammatically negative markers [that] imply contrast and hence evaluation […], but this does not have to be negative evaluation […].” However, in practice negated structures often carry negative evaluation. This is because grammatical negation is evaluatively asymmetrical, in that a negated sentence is dialogic […] and implies the possibility and absence of the positive equivalent, but a positive one does not imply anything and can be taken as purely descriptive. (ibid.)

Hyland and Diani (2009, p. 7) adheres to a similar position: “It is true, however, that a great deal of research writing is characterized by the absence of inscribed evaluation.” He attributes three central functions to evaluation, namely: “it expresses the speaker’s opinion”; “it helps to construct a dialogue and relations of solidarity between the writer and reader; and finally, it helps structure a text in expected ways” (Hyland & Diani, 2009, p. 5). In an earlier publication Hyland (2005, p. 175) dwells in more detail on the use of evaluation: Academic writers’ use of evaluative resources is influenced by different epistemological assumptions and permissible criteria of justification, and this points to and reinforces specific cultural and institutional contexts. Writers’ evaluative choices, in other words, are not made from all the alternatives the language makes available, but from a more restricted sub-set of options which reveal how they understand their communities through the assumptions these encode.

Hyland (2005, pp.  187–188) also introduces the terms ‘stance’ and ‘engagement’ to account for the way writers present themselves in their writings and in relation to their readers, and relates these to disciplinarity, where he makes remarkable observations that have provoked many follow-up studies of interdisciplinary character. More specifically, he argues that scholars in the humanities and social sciences demonstrate a higher degree of personal involvement as compared to those in the hard sciences due to the high degree of interpretability of the discourses, the strong reliance on language for argumentation and the necessity to position their claims at the background of previous research by complying with it, refuting it, or by ‘establishing their niche.’ In the hard sciences, in contrast,

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the background research and methodologies are clear and established, the results are tangible, reproducible, and speak for themselves, so that the expression of the researcher’s personality and attitudes are redundant and the role of language, especially in view of the affordances of modern technologies for visualization, is kept to a minimum. Moreno and Suárez (2008, p. 765), on their part, focus on the necessity to “define precisely what is meant by evaluation” in order to, among other things, be able “to delineate clearly their criteria of comparison (i.e., their tertia comparationis) to ensure that they are comparing comparable evaluation resources,” which is of vital importance in cross-linguistic investigations.

3.2  Criticism: Critique–Negative Evaluation—Confrontation in Academic Communication In order to elucidate the essence and function of confrontation in academic communication, it is necessary to first clarify some basic notions closely related to it. Starting with ‘criticism,’ the dictionary definitions point to two main senses: (1) The act of criticizing, especially adversely. A critical comment or judgment. (2) The practice of analyzing, classifying, interpreting, or evaluating literary or other artistic works. In the context of ‘critical thinking,’ however, “critical” connotes the importance or centrality of the thinking to an issue, question or problem of concern. “Critical” in this context does not mean “disapproved” or “negative.”1 It “has been described as ‘purposeful reflective judgment concerning what to believe or what to do.’” The list of core critical thinking skills includes “interpretation, analysis, inference, evaluation, explanation and meta-cognition” (ibid.) and thus comes much closer to the second sense of ‘criticism’ listed above. ‘Critique’: The term critique derives from the Greek term kritike ̄ (κριτική), meaning “(the art of) discerning”, that is, discerning the value of persons or things. Especially in philosophical contexts it is influenced by Kant’s use of the term 1

 http://en_wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_thinking

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to mean a reflective examination of the validity and limits of a human capacity or of a set of philosophical claims and has been extended in modern philosophy to mean a systematic inquiry into the conditions and consequences of a concept, theory, discipline, or approach and an attempt to understand its limitations and validity. A critical perspective, in this sense, is the opposite of a dogmatic one. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critique)

The online http://www.thefreedictionary.com/critique remarks, however, that:

dictionary

Critique has been used as a verb meaning “to review or discuss critically” since the 18th century, but lately this usage has gained much wider currency, in part because the verb criticize, once neutral between praise and censure, is now mainly used in a negative sense.

In order to verify the statement above, I inspected 50 randomly selected tokens of critique out of altogether 748  in the British National Corpus (BNC-iWeb) consisting of more than 14 billion words. The word was in truth used in a non-negative sense only a couple of times, exclusively in philosophical texts referring to Emanuel Kant’s theory. The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), the largest freely available corpus of English containing more than one billion words, shows 10,139 tokens of critique, almost two-thirds of which are found in academic publications. Since the corpus claims to be balanced in terms of textual sources, this fact demonstrates the highly limited usage of the term that seems to be confined to the vocabulary of certain academic fields. A search of the most frequently used adjectives pre-modifying critique showed, among the first 100 tokens, that within the range of 2–37 possible tokens, 30 adjectives were negative, accounting for 175 (out of 512) of the usages. Both figures account for about 30 percent of the cases of use of critique as a noun in a definitely negative meaning. As a verb, the term is also used predominantly negatively, as even a cursory glance at the immediate context of the tokens in both corpora shows. Following from the above, the term critique is directly related to and could be treated as a synonym of negative evaluation. Martin and White (2005, pp. 11–121) discuss negative evaluation under the term ‘disclaim’ which is defined as: “meanings by which some dialogic alternative is directly rejected or supplanted, or is represented as not applying” (p. 117). They distinguish two sub-categories of disclaim: ‘denial’ or ‘negation’ that

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is “a resource for introducing the alternative positive position into the dialogue, and hence acknowledging it, so as to reject it” (p. 118), while ‘counter’ “includes formulations which represent the current proposition as replacing or supplanting, and thereby ‘countering’, a proposition which would have been expected in its place” (p. 120). Modern argumentation theory goes much deeper into the various aspects of negation and distinguishes among ‘attack,’ ‘opposition,’ ‘rebuttal,’ and ‘refutation’ as different “fundamental logical notions basic to critical argumentation” (Walton et al., 2008, p. 221). Since this theory, however, will serve as a methodological basis for the analysis of ‘The academic war’ in Chap. 5, it will be discussed in more detail there. ‘Confrontation’ on its part is understood in two senses: (1) The act of confronting or challenging another, especially face-to-face; (2) A conflict between armed forces. 2 The Merriam-Webster 3 online dictionary also adds the meaning of “the clashing of forces or ideas” which seems to be the best one applicable to the present discussion. In relation to academic communication, Bourdieu (1999, p.  19) asserted that: As a system of objective relations between positions already won (in previous struggles), the scientific field is the locus of a competitive struggle, in which the specific issue at stake is the monopoly of scientific authority, defined inseparably as technical capacity and social power.

I would add to Bourdieu’s statement that nowadays, at the time of ever-growing numbers of multidisciplinary studies, the struggle in question has already spread not only within but also among various scientific fields. Fröhlich (2003, p.  118) treats this state of affairs as a “Kampf um wissenschaftliche Glaubwürdigkeit” [Fight for scientific credibility] that is directly related to a symbolic capital accumulated during a scholar’s career. This capital, following Bourdieu, consists of the capital of “strictly scientific authority” and the capital of “social authority.” What is more, Bourdieu maintains that scientific conflicts are driven by individual or group interests and are realized by playing down the achievements of the ‘enemies,’ thus valorizing one’s own competence and success. 2 3

 http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/confrontation  http://mw2.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/scholarly

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Commenting on “Bourdieus Konzept im Lichte der Wissenschaftsforschung” [Bourdieu’s concept in the light of science research], Fröhlich (2003, p. 122) notes that: Erstaunlicherweise weist Bourdieus Konzeption rationaler Wissenschaftspraxis starke Ähnlichkeiten mit jener Karl Poppers auf. Popper geht vom sozialen, öffentlichen und institutionellen Charakter der wissenschaftlichen Methoden aus und hält “rücksichtslose” Kritik und offene kognitive Konkurrenz für zentrale Definitionsmerkmale von Wissenschaft. 4

For Bourdieu (1999) the scientific fields are not simply socially but also economically dependent on the financial interests of the dominant class that invests, naturally enough, in areas which are expected to have direct application in production and thus bring about more profit. This is the reason why Bourdieu (1999, p. 42) maintains that there are fields “which have only false autonomy,” especially those belonging to the social sciences, since […] the dominant class has no reason to expect anything from the social sciences  – beyond, at best, a particularly valuable contribution to the legitimation of the established order and strengthening of the arsenal of symbolic instruments of domination.

Therefore, the social sciences can never attain the degree of independence natural sciences enjoy, the autonomy that would allow them to achieve a state of possessing self-regulatory mechanisms to account for and control internal struggles for power and prestige. Following Bourdieu (1999, p. 43), then, The idea of a neutral science is a fiction, an interested fiction which enables its authors to present a version of the dominant representation of the social world, neutralized and euphemized into a particularly misrecognizable and symbolically, therefore, particularly effective form, and to call it scientific.

 All translations in the text are mine. “Astonishingly, Bourdieu’s conception of rational scientific practice shows strong similarities with that of Karl Popper. Popper assumes the social, public, and institutional character of scientific methods and considers “ruthless” criticism and open cognitive competition to be central defining features of science.” 4

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It is no wonder that Bourdieu’s influence on the progress of the sociological and philosophical approaches to the study of the development of science as a social and economic phenomenon has been very powerful since, as the few quotations above demonstrate, he was able, back in the 1970s, to pinpoint and explain the roots of a gap between the natural and the social sciences that has become much wider in the post-modern globalized world—a gap that is due first and foremost to the commercialization of research. In contrast to Bourdieu, whose theory is mainly based on the impact of economic and social factors on scientific development, Tannen (2002, p. 1652) confirms the existence of academic conflicts (under the notion of ‘agonism’), but attributes it primarily to the structures and distributions of power and to the moral and ethical understandings within the academic communities themselves. She offers a very comprehensive overview of the roots and historical development of agonism in academic discourse. Borrowing the term from Ong (1981), she uses it to refer not to conflict, disagreement, or disputes per se, but rather to ritualized adversativeness. In academic discourse, this means conventionalized oppositional formats that result from an underlying ideology by which intellectual interchange is conceptualized as a metaphorical battle. [...]I focus on exposing the destructive aspects of this ideology and its attendant practices.

Tannen traces the roots of modern adversative discourse to the ancient Greek tradition and refers in this connection to Moulton (1983), who “points out that we think of the Adversary Method as the Socratic Method, whereas the true Socratic method (use of counter-argument, elenchus; from the Greek, elenchos) is designed to convince the other person, not to show others that their views are wrong” (Tannen, 2002, p. 1657). Later, in the medieval Christian academy, “students were taught not to search for knowledge and understanding” but “to take a stand in favor of a thesis or to attack a thesis that someone else defended” (Tannen, 2002, p. 1654). In terms of cultural variation, Tannen (2002, p. 1655) points out that: “It is a commonplace among American academics that many British, German, and French counterparts are more given to vitriolic attacks and sarcastic innuendo than are American-trained scholars.” This belief is in tune with Galtung’s (1985) observations which, however, have not as yet been empirically and statistically verified.

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Tannen (2002, p. 1665) calls for “Restoring the person to scholarship” since “The agonistic model of academic discourse is posited […] also on the illusory assumption that the personal has no place in scholarship.” However, a bulk of recent research in academic discourse analysis of late has demonstrated unequivocally that there is a strong tendency toward personalization (see Vassileva, 2000, 2006 and the references therein), so that “one cannot separate the pursuit of knowledge from the community of scholars engaged in that pursuit” Tannen (2002, p. 1665). The issue of academic conflict as a pragmatic aspect of written academic discourse has been addressed by the large number of studies (Belcher, 1995; Salager-Meyer, 1998, 1999, 2001a, b; Swales, 1990; Kourilova, 1996; Motta-Roth, 1998, among many others). Such studies have found out that outright criticism is relatively rare in English academic articles, it is perceived as threatening and therefore writers resort to various hedging devices in order to avoid possible reprisal. Another facet of the phenomenon that has received attention are the variations in the incidence and linguistic expression of criticism in different academic genres (Kourilova, 1996, Hunston, 1993, Motta-Roth, 1998, among others), where it was concluded that book reviews and reviewers’ comments on manuscripts submitted for publication contain much more criticism expressed in a direct manner as compared to articles. Salager-Meyer’s (1998, 1999) investigations have also demonstrated the discipline-specific character of the rhetorical means of articulating conflict. However, contrastive cross-cultural research only touches upon issues of criticism within wider frameworks of politeness strategies, in general, and there are hardly any publications focusing specifically on downright criticism—a gap the present study hopes to start filling.

3.3  Culture: Disciplinary Culture—Community of Practice Scollon and Scollon (2000, 2001) distinguish among ‘cross-cultural communication,’ ‘intercultural communication,’ and ‘interdiscourse communication,’ where in ‘cross-cultural communication’ is the assumption that is of the existence of distinct cultural communities and the necessity to compare their communicative practices. In ‘intercultural communication,’ cultural differences are also presupposed but the object of interest is the interaction with each other.

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Thus, in those two types of studies, cultural belonging is traditionally taken for granted. This stance has been criticized for exhibiting predominant essentialism that makes Intercultural Communication studies an exception in the social sciences, where social constructionist approaches have become the preferred framework in studies of identity (...). The essentialist assumption that people belong to a culture or have a culture […] has given Intercultural Communication a somewhat old-fashioned, dowdy, not-quite-with-it, even reactionary image. (Piller, 2007, p. 209)

Social constructionism, in contrast, maintains that social and linguistic practices determine culture and identity (Burr, 2003) that traditional views of culture as being based on ethnicity, nation, faith, etc., actually deal with imagined communities (Anderson, 1991): That means that members of a culture imagine themselves and are imagined by others as group members. These groups are too large to be ‘real’ groups (i.e. no group member will ever know all the other group members). Therefore, they are best considered as discursive constructions. That means that we do not have culture but that we construct culture discursively. (Piller, 2007, p. 211)

In the modern world, however, ‘culture,’ no matter how it is defined, is in a constant state of flux and crossfertilization. The notion of ‘multiculturalism’ has not appeared incidentally and is especially applicable to academia. Kramsch (1998, p.  82) describes “persons who belong to various discourse communities, and who therefore have the linguistic resources and social strategies to affiliate and identify with many different cultures and ways of using language” as multicultural. Besides, some essentialist approaches to culture may also result in ridiculous claims, as is the case with Chaney and Martin (2004, p. 96) who match ‘verbal style’ with ‘ethnic group’ and state the following about ‘Germans’: “In the German language, the verb often comes at the end of the sentence. In oral communication, Germans do not immediately get to the point.” Some discourses about cultural difference could thus lead to distorted versions of pseudo-Whorfian explanations between language and thought/culture. Atkinson (2004) dwells in detail on three current views of culture that seem to dominate modern research, namely “Received culture versus

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postmodern culture versus cultural studies culture.” The first view could also be called the traditional one, that is, culture is formed and transferred through generations in large groupings of a political and/or ethnic character. Connor (2002) pointed out that Contrastive Rhetoric has largely assumed such a “received culture” perspective. The second, postmodern views of culture (e.g. Appadurai, 1996; Lyotard, 1984) highlight radical change, disruption, discontinuity, inequality, movement, hybridity, difference, and deterritorialization. In other words, they directly address the relentless, chaotic mixing-and-matching that globalization, world capitalism, neo-imperialism, and the diffusion of “Western” popular culture through the media provide at the beginning of the 21st century. (Atkinson, 2004)

Therefore, views of culture that pay no heed to these modern developments remain partial and incomplete, to say the least. The new developments, however, should not be assessed only negatively. Appadurai (1996), among other theorists, maintains that globalization has also led to various positive and interesting cultural synergies and combinations. For example, what is pertinent to the current discussion— the internationalization of academics, although of course based on a highly Westernized model (see Canagarajah, 2002). The third view of culture described by Atkinson (2004) is cultural studies, a field which, despite its name, has taken a rather particular view of culture since its beginnings in 1950s Britain. Heavily influenced by a Marxist view of culture as “a contested and conflictual set of practices of representation bound up with the processes of formation and re-formation of social groups” (Frow & Morris, 1996, p. p.  356), […] its focus is still substantially on viewing “contemporary culture” (During, 1992, p. 1) from an ideological and hegemonic perspective, the underlying claim being that cultural beliefs and practices are developed predominantly under the influence of exposure to mass, popular culture in all its forms and all its power.

Conceptualizing culture as a process rather than a product has brought about a number of studies on the postmodernist-influenced notion of identity (e.g., Holland et  al., 1999; Norton, 2000). The focus in these studies falls on the

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more or less postmodern, decentered, disunified individual who, at the same time as she is subject to multiple (and often contradictory) sociocultural influences, is also somehow able to creatively use these influences to shape herself into something resembling an agentive actor. (Atkinson, 2004)

Refocusing from the society to the subject and from the product to the process by itself does not solve the problem. In order to really understand how those pairs function together and are influenced by each other, we have to use unified synthetic models of society and culture such as Anthony Giddens’ (1979) structuration model, which I am not going to dwell on here in detail. In any case, the present study will try to look at both the product and the process, both the community and the individual. A relatively new branch of anthropology, cognitive anthropology, has been involved in investigating culture mainly in the minds of individuals— through schemas, cultural models, or more recently—connectionist networks (e.g. Strauss & Quinn, 1997): “What people must know in order to act as they do, make the things they make, and interpret their experience in the distinctive way they do” (Quinn & Holland, 1987, p. 4). Another comparatively recent line of research is to look at so-called ‘small cultures,’ that is, to break the analysis down into complexly interacting small, medium-sized, and large cultures in order to get a much more complex notion of the interactions of different cultural forces. This approach is especially productive for the investigation of academic cultures that are the cultures connected with professional peer and reference groups, schools of academic thought and practice, professional approach etc., generated by professional associations, unions, university departments, publishers etc. It is significant that these extend beyond the boundaries of the national culture: […]. (Holliday, 1994, p. 29–30)

Community of Practice Turning now to the notion of discourse community, I should introduce here a definition that has been very influential, namely that of Swales (1990) who claims that there are six defining criteria for discourse community: common goals, participatory mechanisms, information exchange, community specific genres, a highly specialised terminology, and a high general level of expertise; genres are neither simply texts, nor discourse

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communities simply groups of individuals who share attitudes, beliefs, and expectations (for a critical discussion of this definition, see Vassileva, 2006). However, the ever-growing number of interdisciplinary studies today, provoked by the natural need to investigate objects and phenomena from as many angles as possible, together with the rapid development of technology, have blurred the boundaries among the traditional disciplines well-known from the past and have consequently led to the establishment of interdisciplinary teams of scholars whose work is task-based rather than discipline-based. Therefore, the widely accepted notion of the existence of the “academic discourse community” with its common theory, terminology, scholarly and economic interests, etc., has become obsolete and is not able to cover the whole variety of characteristic features of up-to-date research groups in the most general sense of the notion. If one remains committed to the traditional understanding of ‘discourse community,’ one should either recognize the existence of a very large number of very small communities or accept that the academic discourse community has disappeared. A more realistic point of view would be to speak at present of fluctuating communities united by temporary common goals. It is for this reason that a new term was suggested to account for those new formations of scholars, namely that of “Community of Practice” (CofP), introduced by Eckert & McConnell-Ginet (1992). Following Lave and Wenger (1991), they defined a CofP as follows: An aggregate of people who come together around mutual engagement in an endeavor. Ways of doing things, ways of talking, beliefs, values, power relations – in short, practices – emerge in the course of this mutual endeavor. As a social construct, a CofP is different from the traditional community, primarily because it is defined simultaneously by its membership and by the practice in which that membership engages. (Eckert & McConnell-Ginet, 1992, p. 464)

Wenger (1998, p. 76) identifies three basic dimensions of a CofP: (a) Mutual engagement (b) A joint negotiated enterprise (c) A shared repertoire of negotiable resources accumulated over time

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Mutual engagement usually involves regular interaction: It is the basis for the relationships that make the CofP possible. Joint enterprise refers to a process: The joint enterprise is not just a stated shared goal, but a negotiated enterprise, involving the complex relationships of mutual accountability that become part of the practice of the community (Wenger, 1998, p. 80). Shared repertoire: over time, the joint pursuit of an enterprise results in a shared repertoire of joint resources for negotiating meaning (Wenger, 1998, p. 85). This includes linguistic resources such as specialized terminology and linguistic routines, but also resources such as pictures, regular meals, and gestures that have become part of the community’s practice. Wenger (1998, pp. 130–31) suggests that the criterial characteristics of a CofP are instantiated through a number of more specific features: • Sustained mutual relationships—harmonious or conflictual • Shared ways of engaging in doing things together • The rapid flow of information and propagation of innovation • Absence of introductory preambles, as if conversations and interactions were merely the continuation of an ongoing process • Very quick setup of a problem to be discussed • Substantial overlap in participants’ descriptions of who belongs • Knowing what others know, what they can do, and how they can contribute to an enterprise • Mutually defining identities • The ability to assess the appropriateness of actions and products • Specific tools, representations, and other artifacts • Local lore, shared stories, inside jokes, knowing laughter • Jargon and shortcuts to communication as well as the ease of producing new ones • Certain styles recognized as displaying membership • A shared discourse that reflects a certain perspective on the world To sum up, the study will attempt to check the degree of validity of the methodological approaches and theoretical positions discussed above in view of the rhetoric of negative book reviews.

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Hunston, S. (1993). Professional conflict: Disagreement in academic discourse. In M.  Baker, G.  Francis, & E.  Tognini-Bonelli (Eds.), Text and technology: In honour of John Sinclair (pp. 115–134). John Benjamins. Hyland, K. (2005). Stance and engagement: A model of interaction in academic discourse. In Discourse studies Vol 7(2) (pp. 173–192). SAGE Publications. Hyland, K., & Diani, G. (2009). Academic evaluation. Review genres in university settings. Palgrave Macmillan. Kourilova, M. (1996). Interactive function of language in peer reviews of medical papers written by NN users of English. UNESCO-ALSED LSP Newsletter, 19(1), 4–21. Kramsch, C. (1998). Language and culture. Oxford University Press. Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. Cambridge University Press. Lyotard, J.-F. (1984). The postmodern condition: A report on knowledge. University of Minnesota Press. Martin, J. R., & White, P. R. R. (2005). The language of evaluation. Appraisal in English. Palgrave Macmillan. Moreno, A.  I., & Suárez, L. (2008). A framework for comparing evaluation resources across academic texts. Text & Talk, 28-6, 749–769. Motta-Roth, D. (1998). Discourse analysis and academic book reviews: A study of text and disciplinary cultures. In I. Fortanent, S. Posteguillo, J. C. Palmer, & J.  F. Coll (Eds.), Genre studies for academic purposes (vol. 9 Filologi’a) (pp. 29–59). Universitat Jaume I: Colleccio’ Summa. Moulton, J. (1983). A paradigm of philosophy: The adversary method. In S. Harding & M. B. Hintikka (Eds.), Discovering reality (pp. 149–164). Reidel. Norton, B. (2000). Identity in second language learning. Longman. Ong, W. J. (1981). Fighting for life: Context, sexuality, and consciousness. Cornell University Press. Piller, I. (2007). Linguistics and intercultural communication. Language and Linguistic Compass, 1(3), 208–226. Quinn, N., & Holland, D. (1987). Culture and cognition. In D.  Holland & N.  Quinn (Eds.), Cultural models in language and thought (pp.  3–40). Cambridge University Press. Salager-Meyer, F. (1998). The rationale behind academic conflict: From outright criticism to contextual niche’ creation. UNESCO-ALSED LSP, 21, 4–23. Salager-Meyer, F. (1999). Contentiousness in written medical English discourse: A diachronic study (1810–1995). Text, 19(3), 371–398. Salager-Meyer, F. (2001a). „This book portrays the worst form of mental terrorism“: Critical speech acts in medical English Book Reviews (1940–2000). In A. Kertész (Ed.), Approaches to the pragmatics of scientific discourse (pp. 47–72). Peter Lang.

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Salager-Meyer, F. (2001b). The bittersweet rhetoric of controversiality in 19thand 20th-century French and English medical literature. Journal of Historical Pragmatics, 2, 141–173. Scollon, R., & Scollon, S.  W. (2000). Intercultural communication: A discourse approach. Blackwell. Scollon, R., & Scollon, S. W. (2001). Discourse and intercultural communication. In D. Schiffrin, D. Tannen, & H. E. Hamilton (Eds.), The handbook of discourse analysis (pp. 538–547). Blackwell. Shaw, P. (2004). How do we recognise Implicit Evaluation in Academic Book Reviews? In G. Del Lungo Camiciotti & E. Tognini Bonelli (Eds.), Academic discourse – New insights into evaluation (pp. 121–140). Peter Lang. Strauss, C., & Quinn, N. (1997). A cognitive theory of cultural meaning. Cambridge University Press. Swales, J. (1990). Genre analysis. Cambridge University Press. Tannen, D. (2002). Agonism in academic discourse. Journal of Pragmatics, 34, 1651–1669. Thompson, G., & Hunston, S. (2000). Evaluation: An introduction. In G. Thompson & S. Hunston (Eds.), Evaluation in text: Authorial stance and the construction of discourse (pp. 1–27). Oxford University Press. Vassileva, I. (2000). Who is the author? (A contrastive analysis of authorial presence in English, German, French, Russian and Bulgarian academic discourse). Asgard Verlag. Vassileva, I. (2006). Author-audience interaction. A cross-cultural perspective. Asgard Verlag. Vološinov, V. N. (1973). Marxism and the philosophy of language (Ladislav Matejka & I. R. Titunik, Trans.). Seminar Press. Generally attributed to M. M. Bakhtin. Walton, D., Reed, C., & Macagno, F. (2008). Argumentation schemes. Cambridge University Press. Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice. Cambridge University Press.

CHAPTER 4

The Academic Book Review

Abstract  This chapter dwells on the features and functions of the academic book review and uses the methodology of contrastive discourse analysis where the languages envisaged are English and German. The methodological apparatus for the analysis of academic book reviews in the two languages is the classical theory of argumentation. The results of the analysis show that of the three types of argumentation depending on the speaker’s purpose (epistemic, deontic, and ethical), epistemic argumentation dominates the reviews. This is not surprising, since academic discourse generally reflects the natural striving of science for the truth and for explanations of phenomena. Deontic argumentation is observed in recommendations where reviewers usually propose alternative, allegedly better ways and means of solving a particular problem. In contrast to other academic genres, deontic argumentation is relatively more frequent due to the evaluative character of the reviews. The same holds for ethical argumentation that presupposes the categorization of a claim on the scale of ‘good–bad’. Although this kind of personalized evaluation clashes in principle with the universal assumption of the objectivity of science, the

A shorter version of part of this chapter, including all graphs, has been published in: Vassileva, Irena (2010) Critical Book Reviews in German. International Journal of Applied Linguistics 20, N 3. 354–367. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 I. Vassileva, Confrontation in Academic Communication, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-32736-0_4

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wide use of topoi from the person in reviews points once again to their highly subjective character. Especially prominent in this respect is the relatively frequent use of ‘personal attacks’ in English, realized in “scornful, contemptuous, and sarcastic tones” (Tannen, J Pragmatics, 34:1664, 2002)—a fact that contradicts Galtung’s (Struktur, Kultur und intellektueller Stil. Ein vergleichender Essay über sachsonische, teutonische, gallische und nipponische Wissenschaft. In Wierlacher A (ed) Das Fremde und das EigeneJudicum-Verlag, pp 151–193, 1985) observation that the English-­ speaking academic discourse community is more tolerant than the German-speaking one. This new development is most probably due to the function of English as the world lingua franca of research, the language which is the medium of the ever-growing global competition in academia. Keywords  The academic book review • Dialogism • Addressivity • Theory of argumentation • Premises in English and German • Topoi in English and German book reviews

4.1   Introductory Remarks Spink et al. (1998, p. 365) note: “Historically, scholarly book reviews have been of primary interest to three groups: Publishers, librarians, and scholars.” Since the interest of the first two groups is of primarily utilitarian commercial character, the focus of this chapter shall fall on the scholars’ perspective. Academic book reviews not only belong to the traditional, well-­ established academic genres having existed “for almost 2000  years” (Hyland, 2004, p. 42), but also possess a functionally determined, highly evaluative character, thus being potential carriers of academic criticism. They have, however, started receiving closer attention only in the last decades. German linguists have indeed sporadically dealt with the problem over the past 30 years, mainly focusing on: the description of the review article as a text type (Textsorte) (Pätzold, 1984; Gläser, 1990); the reasons for writing reviews from a sociocultural perspective and the expression of evaluation (Wiegand, 1983); and the text structure and linguistic realization of criticism with special emphasis on hedging devices (Wills, 1997; Hutz, 2001).

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It was only relatively recently that a special volume appeared (Hyland & Diani, 2009) looking more closely at review genres and covering basic issues of these text types, namely theoretical overviews of evaluation, disciplinary variation, cross-linguistic variation (involving, however, only English, Spanish and Italian), as well as some diachronic perspectives. This collection of articles was provoked by previous research also in the above-­ mentioned languages, namely Motta-Roth (1996), Shaw (2004), Salager-­ Meyer (2001), Römer (2008), Hyland (2004), Giannoni (2006), Moreno and Suárez (2008), to mention just a few of the most significant publications. Some of these studies deal with a genre very closely related to the academic book review —the academic review article. Swales (2004, p. 208) points to the factors that necessitate the publication of such articles: Even in a small field like applied linguistics, the need for review articles is growing as a result of increasing specialization, the chronological lengthening of many research strands in the field, the proliferation of publishing outlets, the pressure to publish, and the consequent increasing numbers of active participants.

Diani (2007, p.  38) distinguishes between a book review and a book review article, where a book review usually consists in a summary of the content and evaluative observations, whereas a book review article has a “metadiscursive nature” and “authors of book review articles exploit the evaluative dimension to construct argument and ongoing dialogue within the discourse-disciplinary community, where the polyphony of voices is traceable, i.e., their own voices or other textual voices like the reviewed author’s voice [...].” This distinction will become especially clear in the discussion of the material in Chap. 5.

4.2  Definitions and Basic Features Academic book reviews belong to so-called review genres described by Hyland and Diani (2009, p. 1) as “texts and part texts that are written with the explicit purpose of evaluating the research, the texts and the contributions of fellow academics and include book reviews book review articles, review articles, book blurbs and literature reviews.” Referring to Becher (1989) who claims that books are more typical of “rural research areas” where competition is not so much related to timeliness of

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publication, Hyland (2004, p. 43) duly notes that: “Because of this, book reviews continue to play a significant role in the scholarship of the soft disciplines […].” A couple of pages later, however, Hyland seems to contradict his own statement by maintaining that: “The genre is, in a sense, parasitic on the one it critiques; it offers no fresh evidence to the community yet appeals for colleague’s attention, occupying precious pages of space in academic journals.” However, critical and especially negative reviews often offer “fresh evidence” in the form of counterevidence to the results/assumptions/theories, etc. presented in the reviewed book, thus justifying the refutations expressed. Wikipedia, probably the most frequently quoted Internet resource and therefore unavoidable even in the present discussion, suggests the following definition: Book reviews of scholarly books are checks upon the research books published by scholars; unlike articles, book reviews tend to be solicited. Journals typically have a separate book review editor determining which new books to review and by whom. If an outside scholar accepts the book review editor’s request for a book review, he or she generally receives a free copy of the book from the journal in exchange for a timely review. Publishers send books to book review editors in the hope that their books will be reviewed. The length and depth of research book reviews varies much from journal to journal, as does the extent of textbook and trade book review. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_journal#Book_reviews)

In its essence, this definition focuses not so much on the content but rather on the process of production of book reviews; in fact, it seems to reflect the general public’s view of what a book review is about. Wills (1997, p.  136) suggests perhaps the most concise and precise definition of academic book reviews: A person, as a rule an expert, expresses her/his opinion on a scientific work with view to bringing about a (tacit) feedback between herself/ himself and the respective author and to familiarizing a more or less expert leadership with the achievements and failures of the work under review. The reviewer produces, on the basis of his subjective text assessment, a metatext directly related to a primary text.

What follows from this definition are the two basic features of the review:

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1. The discourse of the review is not independent and self-sufficient, but is closely related ideationally to preceding texts and practices, forming a wide and complex network of intertextual links. 2. The two basic communicative functions of the review are the informative and the evaluative. Thus, Spink et  al. (1998, p.  364) note that book reviews allow the audience “to keep abreast of new publications they may wish to acquire and provide a forum for the peer review of new theories and ideas.” From the point of view of systemic-functional grammar (Halliday, 1985), the first point above reflects the ideational and the (inter)textual functions of language, while the second point focuses primarily on the interpersonal function which, as discussed later in this chapter, is the central one for the genre. In fact, there exist two basic contradictory assumptions as to which function is (or should be) dominant in book reviews—the purely ideational/informative or the interpersonal/evaluative one. Shaw (2009, p.  217) represents the first viewpoint and makes a distinction between “interested” and “disinterested” evaluative genres, where “reviews adopt a disinterested stance, clearly intending to give the reader an honest, if personal, evaluation.” Indeed, referring to Bhatia (2004), further on Shaw admits that “an individual review text may have any sort of private purpose, but in the English-speaking academic world […] the genre is read as disinterested, and a writer who is somehow involved with the book reviewed is expected to declare an interest.” To begin with, although this is supposed to be the official purpose of the review, in reality these ‘ideal rules’ are very frequently violated, as the present study is going to demonstrate. Secondly, Shaw maintains that this kind of “honesty” and objectivity is typical of the “English-speaking academic world.” However, evidence will be provided in this study (see especially the chapter on “Academic war”) that proves the opposite and demonstrates that some authors are ready to go to extremes in their ways of expressing vicious criticism in order to assert their claims through refuting the claims of their opponents. I am therefore much more inclined to side with Lather (1999, p. 3), among others, who maintains: “A review is gatekeeping, policing, and

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productive rather than merely mirroring. In short, a review constitutes the field it reviews.” This hypothesis will further be dwelled on in detail in the section below.

4.3  The Reviewer The ‘protagonist’ in the reviewing process is the reviewer, who does not confine himself to factual determinants; he also engages in some sort of self-exposure, in so far as his text contains more or less clearly identifiable and rhetorically competent assessments of a scholar’s work. (Wills, 1997, p. 134)

In addition, concerning the ethics of reviewing, back in 1929 theologians published Zehn Gebote für Rezensenten und solche, die es werden wollen [Ten commandments for reviewers and people who would like to become such]. I would like to quote the first five that seem to be the most relevant to the present discussion: I. There also exists ethics of reviewing. II. Science, whom alone you should serve, is an object and not a person. Therefore, free yourself from everything personal. III. If you write a review, lock away all exclamation marks in your desk. IV. Thou shall not destroy thy opponent. ‘Thou shall not kill’ applies also to reviewers. V. Thou shall not adulate thy friend and thou shall not try to make a career with thy flattery. (From Theologische Blätter 1 (1929), cited in Wiegand, 1983, p. 123) Although written almost 100 years ago, these guidelines demonstrate quite a modern approach to the ethics of reviewing. Do present-day scholars adhere to the above commandments, however? In answering this question, we should first turn to the problem of how scholars today learn review writing as a specific genre of academic writing. Modern journals rarely contain special ‘Guidelines for reviewers,’ and if they do, these are concerned with the general layout (e.g., length, manner of citation) and the basic content requirements for the review (concise summary and general evaluation). Besides, most guidelines are directed toward peer-­ reviewers of submitted articles (see some examples in the section below) and one could only assume that a scholarly book reviewer is expected to

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follow similar requirements. The problem, however, is that the two types of reviewers have to deal with genres that differ not only in length but in many other respects. An Internet search showed that courses in review writing are only occasionally offered to students, primarily at American and Australian universities and as part of general academic writing courses. Therefore, a large number of reviews, especially those produced by younger scholars, are simply summaries of the books concerned, where the evaluative element is either totally missing or the book is recommended to everybody as a whole. Admittedly, writing polemically, evaluatively, and critically for academia is not only difficult in terms of rhetoric but also requires a lot of interpersonal experience in the discourse community and comprehensive and profound knowledge of the field. These are accumulated during a scholar’s professional life, and I thus believe that review-writing skills are mainly acquired through reading and ‘copying’ existing texts produced by experts, i.e., through the exploitation and appropriation of intertextual features. Another problem noted by Swales (2004, p. 208) in relation to review articles stems from the fact that the “low chance of unsolicited manuscripts from unexpected places being accepted and the low chance of little-known people being ‘invited’ constitute formidable practical obstacles.” In other words, it is very unlikely that novices are fortuitous enough to get a review published without any obstructions. This state of affairs leads us to the discussion of the role of the reviewer as a gatekeeper, brought to the fore by some authors. Wiley (1993), for instance, maintains that: Book reviewers, […], are inevitably cast into the three prominent roles of critic, reviewer, and gatekeeper. They must play all of these roles because they represent not only a particular journal’s readership, but also a readership from a much larger heterogeneous community […]. This is, of course, an impossible task: no one can represent a journal’s entire readership, let alone a discipline’s. Nevertheless, the review genre requires that one member speak for a host of others.

In clarifying the difference between ‘reviewer’ and ‘gatekeeper,’ Wiley (1993) refers to Purves’ (1984) distinction and suggests that the main difference is that reviewers render “verdictive” judgments compared to the “effective” judgments of the gatekeeper. Reviewers serve as “surrogates for the common reader and say whether the text is worth reading or not,” with criteria often remaining unexpressed. Gatekeepers, on the

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other hand, Purves says, apparently are limited to academic circles and are charged with deciding “admission, selection, and placement of individuals.”

This difference, however, does not seem to be as clear-cut as it is claimed to be. First, more often than not, reviews are solicited to experts—leaders in the field (see Swales, 2004 quoted above). The same experts, though, are also involved in the gatekeeping practices as described by Purves. At the same time, the fact that an applicant for a position, for instance, has received positive or negative reviews of their publications plays an important role in the decision-making process. In other words, considering the present circumstances where a more or less limited number of experts in the field fulfill both functions simultaneously (those of the reviewers and the gatekeepers), one cannot claim that they could be clearly distinguished. It is hardly possible that a situation may arise where, for instance, an expert who has published a negative review of an applicant’s book would vote in favor of this applicant as a member of a selection committee for a particular position. Continuing his discussion of Purves’ attempts at differentiating the three roles, Wiley (1993) further quotes: The critic’s role, though, is distinguished more by a focus of interest than by a purpose of reading. The critic attempts to relate the text to a context, whether that context be the writer him or herself or the writer’s culture (262). […] The critic’s judgment is “constative,” making “assertions about the composition, perhaps predictions and suggestions as well,” although such statements may not necessarily be conventional or partake of the same value system (263). It seems to me that given the complexity of this rhetorical task and considering, too, the various roles a reviewer would have to play to some degree, it is no wonder that reviewers write “safe” reviews.

The latter consideration has been confirmed by most investigations of academic book reviews and becomes unequivocally clear in cross-cultural studies. Sanz (2009, p.  143–160), for example, compares Spanish and English book reviews in history and finds out that there is “lack of critical voices in Spanish BRs” (ibid., p. 155). One of the reasons is reflected in a Spanish editor’s comment: “Scientific debate is hardly welcomed, and any objection […] is interpreted as offensive, if not by the author him/herself, at least by the bulk of the discipline community” (ibid., p.  156). Book reviews are, then, not considered to be “sites for discipline advancement”

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and are therefore “left in the hands of the junior researchers because of the low rating given to BRs in CVs and professional activity in Spain” (ibid., p. 16). Moreno and Suárez (2009, p. 175) in the same volume come to very similar results using a different corpus and note that “Castilian Spanish reviewers place much greater importance on establishing a harmonious interpersonal encounter with the author of the book,” while “the Anglo-American informants do not seem to see the personal relationship between the reviewer and the author of the book as a central one.” These culture-specific differences may lead to negative consequences for Spanish (in this case) reviewers trying to publish in English, since they would not meet the expectations of the English-speaking audience or as a former review editor remarked: When I was reviews editor for […] I told reviewers that we would only accept ‘balanced’ reviews (pointing to flaws and positives). To be honest, I did reject several Spanish reviews because they were insufficiently critical. (Moreno and Suárez (2009, p. 176)

Unfortunately, as mentioned above, there have been contrastive studies of the genre accounting only for comparisons between English and Spanish, French, Italian and Japanese (Itakura & Tsui, 2011) so far, and a fairly recent publication on English and Turkish (Bal-Gezegin, 2016). In terms of motivation, Wiegand (1983, p. 125–6) enumerates several reasons for writing a scientific review: (a) Economic reasons (b) Science policy reasons (c) Publishing house policy (d) Scientific reasons (e) Reviewer-related reasons (f) Reasons arising from the communication between the reviewer and the reviewee It is practically impossible to unveil unequivocally the motives of a reviewer to write a review, since, most probably, even an anonymous questionnaire would result in a unanimous answer—‘for purely scientific reasons.’ In order to save their face, no scholar is likely to officially admit to have written a review (be it positive or negative) for any other reasons. Individual discussions, institutional gossip, and attacks from the rear

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belong to the dark side of academic life and, curious as they are, they do not lend themselves to objective research. Simon (1996, p. 240) gives some reasons of why NOT to review a book: When I receive a book with grave shortcomings, I let the editor know quickly that I don’t think it deserves reviewing space. You know the author. Although it may be tempting to write a strong review for a friend whose book you admire, it is also unethical. […] You are being published, or are seeking to be published, by the same publisher. […] You are not the book’s intended audience.

The first reason listed by Simon starts from the assumption that only books of high quality should be reviewed. The question that arises here is: how would audiences be informed on the publication of low-quality books, respectively, warned NOT to buy/read them? Such a stance would also mean that the discourse community in the respective field is not willing to admit the existence of low-quality products coming from their inner circle, thus trying to artificially claim to maintain high standards of academic output. I am personally not inclined to agree with Simon’s second reason, either—why shouldn’t a publication of outstanding merit be reviewed positively only due to the existence of a personal/friendly relationship? On the other hand, it is no secret that in practice it is very frequently that scholars publish praising reviews of colleagues’ books driven by purely personal forces. Thus, the problem, I believe, does not boil down to being ethical or not, but to being honest and truthful. Third, it is customary for a scholar to be both an author and a reviewer with the same publisher, since these practices are related both to the common academic field and to the more or less limited number of experts in a field. That is, playing both roles (author and reviewer) is in many cases even inevitable. Giannoni (2007, p. 58) brings to the fore a very different, purely utilitarian reason for the observed reluctance to write academic book reviews: For this reason, like other eminently metatextual scholarly genres (e.g., letters, book reviews and introductions), they [book reviews] are not normally included in research output assessments. The British RAE system (see ), for example, lists the following types of acceptable output: authored book, edited book, chapter in book, journal article, conference

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contribution, patent/published patent application, software, report for external body, confidential report for external body, internet publication, performance, composition, design, exhibition, artefact, scholarly edition, other forms of assessable output.

The same observation was also made for the Spanish academic discourse community (see above), as well as for the Australian one. ObengOdoom (2014, p. 78) notes that “book reviews are pushed to the margins of academic activity,” and “the widely known Bradley Review of Australian Higher Education (Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations, 2008) did not include book reviews in its list of ‘weighted research publications’” (ibid.). Apparently, various national and/or disciplinary cultures lay different emphasis on the role of the academic book review in the constitution and maintenance of various relationships and practices within the respective discourse community. Fröhlich (2003, p.  123) adds still another reason for scholars’ reluctance to criticize: Die eigentümliche Zurückhaltung bei Kritik erklärt sich auch aus der Befürchtung, kritisierte Kollegen könnten sich als Gutachter unter dem Schutz der Anonymität »rächen«. Fundiert Kritik zu üben ist aufwendiger, als Komplimente zu verteilen, nützt der Konkurrenz, Replikationsstudien bringen kaum Reputation ein. Zudem wird Kritik oft kaum zur Kenntnis genommen.1

Thus, we arrive at the inevitable discussion of the function of the academic book review within the discipline, the discourse community, and its relationship to the notion of intertextuality. I shall start with some considerations concerning intertextuality and the closely related notion of interdiscursivity since these phenomena are inherent to the genre of the academic book review. Martin (1998, p.  7–9) discusses two basic approaches to the understanding of ‘intertextuality’ where both have to do “with reactions to Saussure’s langue/parole opposition” (ibid., p. 7). According to Halliday 1  The peculiar reluctance when it comes to criticism can also be explained by the fear that criticized colleagues could “take revenge” as reviewers under the protection of anonymity. Giving well-founded criticism is more time-consuming than handing out compliments, it benefits the competition, and replication studies hardly bring any reputation. In addition, criticism often goes largely unnoticed.

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and his followers, the langue/parole dichotomy is traditionally interpreted as the relation between potential and actual. Thus, parole is the realization of language—“the manifestation of a culture’s linguistic meaning potential in text” (ibid. p.  8). The other approach, most closely related to Bakhtin and the critical theorists, rejected the idealization and formalism involved in Saussure’s dichotomy “and developed models which focused on the heteroglossic nature of cultures and the dialogism inherent in texts” (ibid., p.  8). The term ‘intertextuality’ was first introduced by Kristeva (e.g., 1986) to account for Bakhtin’s multi-voiced nature of texts and their relations to other texts. Both approaches are primarily concerned with the process and result of textualization and of text as the site of semiotic and cultural change and exchange. While the Hallidayan functionalists, however, foreground the more formal features of this process, the ‘critical perspectivists’ focus on the instance and its relation to other similar instances, on individual interpretation rather than collectively predetermined cognitive schemata that mediate access to knowledge and make communication possible. Foucault (1972, p. 98) claims that “there can be no statement that in one way or another does not re-actualise others.” For Bakhtin, texts and utterances are predetermined by and responding to prior texts, at the same time anticipating subsequent texts. Thus, each utterance is oriented both retrospectively to previous utterances and prospectively to forthcoming utterances. This makes it populated by snatches of others’ utterances, so that each resulting utterance or text is inherently intertextual, i.e., it consists of elements of other texts. Another distinction made by French discourse analysts is between manifest and constitutive intertextuality (Maingueneau, 1976). In the first case other, normally previous texts are explicitly present and marked in the form of citations. In the case of ‘constitutive intertextuality’ the incorporation of other texts is not overtly marked on the surface, they rather show the belonging of a text to a particular text type or a particular genre where the reader/listener is expected to share the author’s knowledge of previously encountered texts. Fairclough (1989, p. 104) states: I shall use intertextuality as a general term for both manifest and constitutive intertextuality when the distinction is not as issue, but introduce the new term ‘interdiscursivity’ rather than constitutive intertextuality when the

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distinction is needed, to underline that the focus is on discourse conventions rather than other texts as constitutive.

Candlin and Maley (1997, p. 203) make a similar distinction between ‘intertextuality’ and ‘interdiscursivity’: Discourses are made internally variable by the incorporation of intertextual and interdiscursive elements. Such evolving discourses are thus intertextual in that they manifest a plurality of text sources. However, insofar as any characteristic text evokes a particular discoursal value, in that it is associated with some institutional and social meaning, such evolving discourses are at the same time interdiscursive.

Text linguists, on their part, tend to adopt a ‘narrower’ view of intertextuality as ‘sharing ideational content’ between texts as products, i.e., written texts. A typical example of intertextuality realization is thus the overt introduction of other authors’ texts or quotations and references. This generally accepted understanding of intertextuality among linguists has made, for example, Ventola (1999) try to look for another term in order to “go beyond textual cohesion and coherence and focus on how texts are interrelated semiotically” (ibid. p. 2), so she introduces the term ‘semiotic spanning’ to account for “how texts relate to each other by spanning semiotically, i.e. linking up with various kinds of existing and experienced texts (and other semiotic modalities) and creating new semiosis through these links” (ibid.). Book reviews represent one of the most intertextually and interdiscursively loaded genres in academic communication. Hyland (2004, p. 41) states: While writers of research articles commonly avoid critical references, reviews are centrally evaluative. Intertextuality thus carries greater risks of personal conflict, for while most academic genres are evaluative in some way, the book review is most explicitly so.

Besides, apart from making extensive use of manifested intertextuality by directly referring to/quoting the evaluated book, the review also creates a web of interdiscursive links and “the reviewer can help shape the way a new work is interpreted and through criticisms possibly influence a given author’s future work as well as influence the kind of work other scholars and researchers pursue” (Wiley, 1993).

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The reviewer as ‘author’ takes enormous responsibility, since readers take up meanings encoded in texts and attribute them to the source, to the particular person who has produced them. It is generally believed that in written communication authors have no control of possible readership destinations and, respectively, of the ways their messages are understood. This, however, is not the case with reviewers since, as a rule, “The reviewer’s judgments are in resonance with ongoing discussions in the wider field, discussions conducted in professional publications, at conferences, and at our respective institutional sites.” (Wiley, 1993). In other words, the audience of the review is addressed rather than invoked in terms of Ong’s (1977) distinction (for a more detailed discussion, see Phelps, 1990; Tomlinson, 1990; Vassileva, 2006) since, as mentioned above, most reviews are solicited by review editors of particular journals whose readership is more or less known to the reviewer. In any case, authorship, as is the case in politics, for instance, remains consequential. Individual utterances are, more often than not, heavily charged with ideological and historical voices and for Bakhtin authorship is a trope for building a self through its tensile, mutually constitutive relations to everything that is non-self. Communication is thus realized via dialogism, via interpretation. Wiley (1993) states that: “Reviewers, then, become translators of new work by enacting a dialogue between a colleague’s contributions and ongoing concerns in the field as the reviewer sees them.” Dialogism is not only a theory of discourse but also a philosophy that views the world metaphysically as a communicative system. Bakhtin’s analysis of language, and specifically of utterance, provides a reinterpretation of dialogic interaction where the utterance has a triadic structure: It is oriented from the author’s consciousness toward the object or topic and also toward a projected response, thus toward others. But utterance is not psychologically bounded; rather, every element in its structure is already social (thus the boundary is breached), and each modifies every other (and the context) further by participating in the discourse event. (Phelps, 1990, p. 166)

For Bakhtin, the interface between the individual utterance and the social lies, first of all, in the language base since the language base from which an utterance borrows signs is “not an abstract system of normative forms but rather a concrete heteroglot conception of the world” where “each word tastes of the context and contexts in which it has lived its socially charged life: all words and forms are populated by intentions” (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 293; see also Volosinov, 1973, p. 86).

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Second, the immediate source of utterance, i.e., the author’s consciousness and experience is also socially grounded. For Bakhtin, the external chain of events is not experience unless it is expressed, and therefore ideologically shaped and socially oriented. Thus, consciousness (or self-experience) is a product of expression where “the constant movement of experience toward objectification in ideological forms (language, science, art) provides a social structure to the inner world, and makes of the psyche ‘shared territory’” (Phelps, 1990, p. 167). The self is a project that exists only by virtue of dialogue. “As the world needs my authority to give it meaning, I need the authority of others to define, or author, myself. The other is in the deepest sense my friend, because it is only from the other that I can get my self” (Clark & Holquist, 1984, p. 65). Third, every utterance is a response to the situational and dialogic context with its conditions and situational requirements. That context is partly a context of prior utterances, so that “every utterance must be regarded primarily as a response to preceding utterances of the given sphere. […] Each utterance refutes, affirms, supplements, and relies on the others, presupposes them to be known, and somehow takes them into account” (Bakhtin, 1986, p.  91). The latter statement could hardly be more legitimate for other genres than for the book review which is both a response to preceding utterances in the literal sense of the phrase and a response to the situational and dialogic context in addressing issues immediately related to prior and current state-of-the art in the field. Fourth, following Bakhtin (1986, p. 276), when referring to an object, the author is overwhelmed by scores of words already spoken about or naming the object (as theme or topic of the utterance): Between the word and its object [...] there exists an elastic environment of other, alien words about the same object, the same theme […] The word, directed toward its object, enters a dialogically agitated and tension-filled environment of alien words, value judgments and accents, weaves in and out of complex interrelationships, merges with some, recoils from others, intersects with yet a third group.

And a fifth point in Bakhtin’s philosophical work that is especially relevant to studies of audience and authorship is addressivity as a function of speech genre. The utterance is most distinctively social in its orientation toward an addressee, or audience. The word then encounters “the profound influence of the answering word that it anticipates” (Bakhtin, 1986, p. 280). The author deliberately shapes an utterance in view of the envisioned answer. The speaker thus orients his utterance toward

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a specific conceptual horizon, toward the specific world of the listener; it introduces totally new elements into his discourse; it is in this way, after all, that various different points of view, conceptual horizons, systems for providing expressive accents, various social ‘languages’ come to interact with one another. (Bakhtin, 1986, p. 282)

It is this otherness that creates dialogue: “The speaker breaks through the alien conceptual horizon of the listener, constructs his own utterance on alien territory, against his, the listener’s apperceptive background” (ibid.). The latter two points also reflect the philosophical background of the relationship between the reviewer/the review and the discipline/discourse community. Wiley (1993) sees book reviewing as an integral part of “the critical practices we regularly engage in throughout the sequence of activities typical of academic work” through involvement in discussions which address themes, issues, controversies, practices, and modes of presentation [that] are integral to the discipline and help form that interconnected network of ideas yoking the concrete pedagogies we enact in our individual classrooms with the theoretical concerns that are the subjects of research and scholarship.

Further on, Wiley (1993) turns to the function of the review as setting standards and criteria for academic merit: “The review is not simply an evaluation based on criteria, whether implicit or explicit, but an inquiry into those criteria themselves concerning” good “work being done now and in the future.” Hyland (2004, p.  41) shares this point of view and notes that: “Here we see the workings of the peer group in perhaps its most nakedly normative role, where it publicly sets out to establish standards, assess merit and, indirectly, evaluate reputations.” With their ‘addressive’ character, book reviews thus contribute considerably to the establishment of the discipline’s identity as a whole and to the status of the individual members of its discourse community: Judgements can therefore carry significant social consequences and criticism becomes a potential source of friction because it can represent a direct challenge to a specific author. Negotiating social interactions therefore involves charting a perilous course between critique and collegiality, minimising personal threat while simultaneously demonstrating an expert understanding of the issues. (Hyland, 2004, p. 41)

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4.4  Structure and Formal Characteristics of the Academic Book Review In terms of the formal characteristic features of the review, Hyland’s (2004, p. 43) representative corpus consisting of 20 reviews per discipline in eight disciplines showed that: Reviews in the hard fields are often considerably shorter. […] [They] varied in their average length between 1,700 words in philosophy and 400  in electronic engineering, presumably because these disciplines afford books less importance than the soft fields.

Although the structure of the academic book review is not strictly defined, the following two examples taken from guidelines for university students and young scholars demonstrate the generally accepted rhetorical steps in the construction of this text type: Example 1  (From Writing the Academic Book Review by Wendy Belcher p.  3–4, accessed at: www.chicano.ucla.edu/press/siteart/jli_bookreview guidelines.pdf) Book reviews are usually 600 to 2000 words in length. It is best to aim for about 1000 words, as you can say a fair amount in 1,000 words without getting bogged down. […] Classic book review structure is as follows: • Title including complete bibliographic citation for the work (i.e., title in full, author, place, publisher, date of publication, edition statement, pages, special features [maps, color plates, etc.], price, and ISBN • One paragraph identifying the thesis and whether the author achieves the stated purpose of the book • One or two paragraphs summarizing the book • One paragraph on the book’s strengths • One paragraph on the book’s weaknesses • One paragraph on your assessment of the book’s strengths and weaknesses

Example 2  Accessed at: http://www.arts.monash.edu.au/lls/resources.php

Remember that you have to support this view in your critique and that the structure of your critique depends on your overall impression of the reviewed material as given in your thesis

Explain whether you agree/disagree/ partly agree with it.

5.Present Thesis Statement

4. Mention what authority or expertise the author has to write on the subject.

Is the research qualitative or quantitative?

What was done?

Why the research was carried out?

Background

What facts does the author rely on to support their hypotheses?

What idea is the author proposing?

Hypotheses

How was the experime nt/ research done?

Methods

Are there suggestions for further research?

Do recommenda tions follow from the results?

What was found and what does it mean?

Results and discussion

What was the conclusion of the research / study?

Conclusion

The summary should be objective and should not include any personal interpretation or discussion. In a research based article, summarise each section of the article.

2. Introduce topic and mention author’s purpose. (found in synopsis or abstract).

Introduction including the research question.

Main purpose of the summary is to provide the reader with adequate information necessary to understand the critical commentary that follows.

1.Establish context, mention the title of the article and author.

3. Comment on appropriateness of author’s purpose in terms of timelessness and importance of subject.

Summary

Introduction

Structure

Purpose

WRITING A CRITICAL REVIEW

Was the counter argument fully considered?

What evidence is brought to support the argument (conclusion)?Was the evidence convincing, novel, insig htful?

Evidence

Why have they selected this particular argument?

Have they established their expertise?

Who are the authors?

Arguers

Are all key words well defined? (described)

Definitions

What was their insight, i.e, was the argument novel, risky, open to falsification?

Was it stated up front?

What is the explicit or implicit argument/ perspective (conclusion) of the paper?

Argument

Ask yourself the following questions about the article.

4. Comment on whether or not the reviewed material makes a useful contribution to the body of literature already published in the area.

3.Restate your own response to the article that has been reviewed from the introduction.

2. Using your critique as a base, make a judgment about how successful author has been in achieving their purpose.

1. Restate the purpose of the article/ book.

Restates the most important comments from the introduction and sums up the main critical points from your Critique.

The purpose of the critique is to express your judgments and comments about the writing you are reviewing. It consists of personal judgments, comments and opinions.

Conclusion

Critique

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Hedging Expressions It should be the case that….. Viewed in this way…… It might be suggested that…. There is every hope that… It may be possible to obtain…. It is important to develop…. It is useful to study……….. It is not known whether One cannot exclude from……. It is/it is not difficult to conclude from…

To introduce an additional idea in addition, another reason/ aspect/example, furthermore, moreover, besides, also To introduce an opposite idea or contrast On the other hand, in contrast, in spite of, Although, still, nonetheless, instead, compare this with, alternatively, otherwise, on the contrary, rather To give an example For example, for instance, an example of this is, a further instance of this is, To list ideas in order of time First, first of all, first and foremost, second, more important, most important, more significantly, above all, most of all, concurrently, an additional To introduce an explanation or make a stronger statement In fact, indeed To introduce a result Accordingly, as a result, as a consequence, consequently, for these reasons, hence, therefore, thus To point to evidence It can be seen that, the evidence is that, in support of this To make a tentative statement Studies suggest that, perhaps, it would seem that, it tends to be the case that, studies indicate

Academic Language for reporting and connecting ideas

https://www.jcu.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0003/1 22844/jcuprd1_073145.pdf

Writing a critical review

Useful Links

Discipline Examples

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The third example stems from a corpus-based investigation of book reviews in English and Spanish. Moreno and Suárez (2009, p. 165) established the following “rhetorical structure” in terms of moves: Move 1. Introducing the book Move 2. Outlining the book Move 3. Highlighting parts of the book Move 4. Providing closing evaluation of the book The fourth example represents the requirements of the Internet site most widely used by linguists (Linguistlist) for book reviewers 2: Guidelines for Submitting Reviews LINGUIST List only accepts reviews that have been solicited through the reviews system. Unsolicited reviews will not be accepted. General Instructions Your review should consist of the following parts in the order indicated. (Do not include the numbers, however.) 1. A short bibliographical description of the book. 2. Your by-line, consisting of your name and affiliation, as in the following examples 3. A description or summary of the book’s purpose and contents. […] 4. A critical evaluation. Insofar as you can, point out some of the merits and defects of the book, identify problems, ask questions, and present positive or negative implications of the analyses contained in it. […] In keeping with standard LINGUIST policy, we ask that reviewers keep the tone of reviews scholarly and avoid directly attacking persons and institutions. This does not mean that the reviewer should avoid controversy or criticism, only that the tone of that criticism should be maintained at a scholarly level. Reviews that do not meet LINGUIST standards for scholarly discourse will be returned to the author for revision. […] (Practical considerations following)

As expected, the guidelines for university students are much more detailed in terms of structure and steps, but still they do not differ significantly from those published on Linguistlist. Of special interest for 2

 http://linguistlist.org/pubs/reviews/guidelines.cfm

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the present study is the last paragraph above, which dwells on the ethical component of the reviewing process. Looking closer at the standard described there, one inevitably notices two peculiarities: First, what is unacceptable is not criticism but an improper tone or, to put it otherwise, wording, or language; Second, the word repeated in each of the three sentences constituting the paragraph is scholarly. The Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary, for instance, gives the following (vague) definition of scholarly: “of, characteristic of, or suitable to learned persons.” Few people, just like few dictionaries, would probably take the word in the sense of “characterized by careful evaluation and judgment,” which is most likely to have been meant above. Besides, as some cross-cultural studies mentioned above demonstrated, the notion of being scholarly may vary considerably, interculturally.

4.5  Aims of the Study and Data The present analysis aims to elucidate the argumentation strategies used by review writers, the degree to which criticism is based on objective logic, and the degree to which it is based on subjective personal evaluation, and their evident preference for certain content topics. It is based on a sample corpus of 10 book reviews per language in the field of English and German applied linguistics, which have a definitely negative character—meaning that the book is eventually not recommended to the readers. I chose the field of Applied Linguistics for two basic reasons: first, being myself an applied linguist, to guarantee the correct understanding of the content and second, because there is evidence (Hunston, 1993) that linguists get involved in contentious debates more extensively than scholars from other disciplines. Motta-Roth (1996, p. 22) suggests that the latter is due to “an attempt to compensate for the indefiniteness in the basic theoretical apparatus of the discipline.” This study ventures to explicate the argumentation strategies used by review writers within the classical Aristotelian framework, where ‘argumentation’ is defined as “mehr oder weniger komplexe Sprachhandlungen, mit Hilfe derer die Zuhörer oder Gesprächspartner überzeugt werden sollen” [more or less complex speech acts with whose help the listeners or conversation partners should be convinced] (Ottmers, 1996, p. 65).

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4.6  Methodology Van Eemeren (1996) defines argumentation as any attempt to justify or refute an opinion by verbal means, directed toward the approbation of audience. Since the present investigation is also concerned with the linguistic means of refuting the claims of other scholars, I start from the assumption that, from a functional point of view, denials may take the surface form of explicit negatives, but may also be implied in order to superficially establish alignment with the other participants in the discussion who are supposed to belong to the same discourse community. Whether this discourse community really exists with the structure it is traditionally considered to exhibit, however, is a question still to be answered. Moreover, as stated by Pagano (1994, p. 256), “When a denial is expressed, the producer is projecting a world in which what is denied is accepted, that is, in which there is an understanding that the producer and his/her readers accept the proposition being denied.” This means that participants should share cognitive schemata or, in terms of classical rhetoric—generic premises. However, as Pagano (1994, p. 257) goes on to say, “We should always bear in mind that even the more general schemas are culture-specific.” As mentioned above, the present investigation is methodologically based on the Aristotelian theory of argumentation. McElholm (2002, p.  67–68) arrives at the following more detailed definition of ‘argumentation,’ which I shall adhere to as well: Argumentation takes place when there is disagreement (or lack of agreement) as to a certain state of affairs, or as to what should be done, or as to whether something is good or bad; a speaker or writer intends to bring about consensus on the subject, i.e. transform disagreement into agreement, by persuading his or her audience of the correctness of the point of view put forward by him or her by advancing an argument which appeals to certain commonly held beliefs or opinions, i.e. beliefs or opinions shared by his or her audience.

A distinction made in modern rhetoric studies that seems relevant our purposes is Eggs’ (1994, p.  16ff.; 1996, p.  183) classification argumentation into three types depending on the author’s objectives. his view, there are three ways to react to a controversial problem the type:

to of In of

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Eggs’ classification Problem: T or not T? For T Against T Argumentation

to assert to deny epistemic

to advise in favor of to advise against Deontic

The first dichotomy relates to the truth value of the claims (ideational function in terms of Halliday, 1985). The second points to the necessity to take a course of action (or not). The third opposition is scalar and places research findings on the scale of ‘good–bad’ in terms of ethic/aesthetic qualities. A notion playing a crucial role within this theory is that of topos (topic): “Common topoi are general principles or rules of human inference which serve to guarantee the transition from the premises to the conclusion” (McElholm, 2002, p. 77). There are two main types of topoi: those based on everyday logic generic premises and those with conventionalized conclusions, which are further subdivided into: I. Topoi based on everyday logic generic premises:

1. Topoi from the consequence • cause and effect • reason and consequence • means and goal



2. Topoi from the comparison • identity or similarity • difference or low degree of similarity • ‘more or less’



3. Topoi from the contrast • absolute contrast • relative contrast • alternative contrast • semantically incompatible opposites

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4. Topoi from the division (classification) • part and whole • species and genus • definition



5. Topoi from the example II. Topoi with conventionalized conclusions



1. Topoi from the authority 2. Topoi from the analogy 3. Topoi from the person

These topoi will serve as analytical methodological instruments for the analysis of argumentation in academic publications. Pagano (1994, p. 251) defines denials as follows: “In denials, the ideational component is predominant: when we deny something, we are concerned with expressing our view on a particular fact, that is, whether things are one way or another.” As far as the distinction between explicit and implicit denials is concerned, “it is not the denials themselves, but the propositions that are being denied” (Pagano, 1994, p. 252), while implicit denials “originate as a product of an assumption by the producer in relation to his/her interlocutor’s beliefs” (Pagano, 1994, p. 253). In this study, I shall deal with both explicit denials and direct criticism.

4.7  Results 4.7.1  Premises The expression of criticism may take various forms and may be based on different premises  – theoretical assumptions, methodological failures, relevance of data, etc. I have divided the premises into content-oriented and form-oriented, where the first type refers to criticism of the content per se, while the latter refers to the graphic representation, spelling mistakes, and the structure in general. Graphs 4.1 and 4.2 show the distribution of the two types and their sub-types within the corpus in percent. As the data demonstrates, in both languages, the most frequent premise for criticism is theoretical deficiency or failure. While in German, however, this accounts for 21 percent of the cases; in English it covers almost half of

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Theory Aim/realization Method./analysis Recommendation Terminology Title/content Typogr./layout Expression Structure Graph 4.1  Content- and form-based premises in German Theory Aim/realization Method./analysis Recommendation Terminology Title/content Typogr./layout Expression Structure Graph 4.2  Content- and form-based premises in English

the cases (48 percent). Next in English comes criticism of methodology/ analysis (22 percent), while in German it is almost equal to that of pointing to discrepancies between the aim(s) of the respective study/course book and their realization, recommendations for improvements and erroneous and/or imprecise use of terminology. Discrepancy between title and content plays a negligible role in English (0.8 percent) and a minor one in German (4 percent). These results corroborate Hyland’s (2004, p.  46) conclusion that: “Most of the evaluations, not surprisingly, addressed

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content issues, and about 68 percent of all judgements fell into this category, almost equally between praise and criticism.” In spite of Hutz’s (2001, p.  119) statement that: “Die häufigen Hinweise auf gefundene Tippfehler scheinen auch eine berufsbedingte Spezialität der Linguisten zu sein,” 3 criticism of form accounts for 15 percent of the cases in German, where references are made to typography and layout (8 percent), linguistic expression (4 percent), and structure (3 percent), and only for 3.8 percent in English. The results seem to contradict, at first sight at least, Clyne’s (1991, 1993a, b) observations concerning cross-cultural variations between German and English publications and values in terms of weight of importance of content (in German), on the one hand, and of structure (in English), on the other. Obviously, linguists  – native speakers of English differentiate clearly between structure and form and do not consider the latter to be of paramount importance. Hyland’s (2004) investigation of book reviews in various disciplines showed a tendency to praise general features and criticize specific ones: “[…] while over 80 percent of the positive commentary on content addressed general aspects of the book, critical observations tended to be more specific, with 60 percent referring to particular content issues.” This, however, does not seem to be the case in the present investigation as far as German reviews are concerned. German reviewers tend to attach more importance to theoretical and analytical aspects of academic publications. This result is also in accordance with Clyne’s (1991, 1993a, b) above-­ mentioned observations concerning cross-cultural variations between German and English. 4.7.2  Topoi Turning now to the topoi used as instruments of argumentation, from the list of topoi presented above (Sect. 4.6), the following types have been identified in the corpus (in percent) (Graphs 4.3 and 4.4): As the data demonstrates, in German one-third of the topoi consist of topos from the person which, together with topos from the authority make up 44 percent of all cases; in English, the percentage is lower (22 percent + 4.5 percent). That is, unlike other academic genres where argumentation 3  The frequent references to printing mistakes also seem to be a professionally related speciality of linguists.

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Person Example Means & goal Authority Cause & effect Contrast Classification Definition Graph 4.3  Topoi in German book reviews Person Example Means & goal Authority Cause & effect Contrast Classification Definition Graph 4.4  Topoi in English book reviews

is primarily based on topoi based on everyday logic generic premises (see e.g., Vassileva, 2006 for spoken academic communication), within the genre of the academic book review the topoi with conventionalized conclusions account for a relatively high percentage of argumentation. Thus, it seems that the review is one of the few academic genres that is highly personalized. Hyland (2004, p.  57) treats this feature of book review texts as a mitigation strategy:

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By foregrounding their commentary as a personal response, reviewers can make subtle adjustment to the interactional context and set up a different relationship with their readers. This allows them to adopt a less threatening authorial voice, repositioning themselves and their authority by reacting as an ‘ordinary’ reader rather than as an ‘expert’”

and concludes (ibid.) that: “Personal attribution, then, conveys the limitation of the criticism, representing it as the writer’s individual opinion rather than an objective characteristic of the volume.” Hutz (2001, p.  125) found out that criticism in German is, on the whole, direct, but at the same time impersonally formulated in order to make it sound more objective. The present study confirms this observation: topoi from the person are rarely introduced from the I-perspective in spite of the fact that they clearly express personal opinion: (1) [Topos from the person] Wünschenswert wäre in diesem Punkt allerdings eine ausführlichere Erläuterung dessen, was in nicht mehr als drei Absätzen als “Charisma” eingeführt […] wird. [In any case, at this point a detailed clarification would be desirable of that, which is introduced as “Charisma” in no more than three paragraphs.]

As the example demonstrates, the topos from the person is, apart from other premises, almost exclusively used in recommendations, which is only natural. In other cases, this topos expresses review writer’s dissatisfaction with theory, analyses, etc., which, however, does not necessarily mean that other readers of the same book would share their opinion: (2) [Topos from the person] Bayers Einführung bietet einen linguistischen Zugang zur logischen Analyse, aber leider auch in eingeschränkter Weise. [Bayer’s introduction offers a linguistic approach to logical analysis, but unfortunately in a limited way.]

In English, in contrast, this topos is very often realized in the form of a personal attack and may have a snide and sneering, contemptuous tone: (3) But in my view, the outcome was merely a bizarre charade of camouflaged communication where the lion’s share of the analyst’s work was kept out of sight by invoking the “native speaker’s intuition” and “introspection” (cf. Beaugrande, 1998b).

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In this last example, there is a shift from condemning the content of the book under review to denouncing the author as incompetent and arrogant, thus flouting the “need to facilitate a continued sense of solidarity with their readers” (Hyland, 2004, p. 48). The topos from the authority prevails in criticism of theoretical and terminological issues, usually pointing either to failures or to deficiencies. In German, it is three times more frequently employed than in English (14 percent to 4.5 percent): (4) [Topos from the authority] Es kann jedoch vermutet werden, dass eine derartig vereinfachende Konzeption von Medienwirkungen kaum jemals so einflussreich war, dass sie diese ausführliche Beachtung verdient hätte (z.B. Brosius/Esser 1998). [One can, however, assume that such a simplified conception of media influence could hardly have ever been so influential as to deserve such a detailed description (e.g., Brosius/Esser 1998).] (5) [Topos from the authority] Hingewiesen sei in diesem Zusammenhang auf die hervorragende Arbeit von Dieling (1992), in der… [In this connection one should refer to Dieling’s (1992) seminal work, where…] (6) But then Saussure never said it was, and nor did anybody else as far as I know. So this departure from tradition is not a radical theoretical innovation at all but a rudimentary mistake, […].

In German, the most frequent among the topoi based on everyday logic generic premises is the topos from the example (22 percent). Of course, this is not surprising for the genre since reviews often draw directly on the original text for argumentation: (7) [Topos from the example] Neben diesem elementaren Mangel sind die oftmals holzschnittartigen und pauschalen Argumentationen sowie die polemischen bis disqualifizierenden Kommentare der Autoren höchst ärgerlich. Zu den harmloseren Beispielen zählt die Schilderung eines Fußballspiels, … [Apart from this elementary deficiency, the often broad-brush and sweeping argumentation, as well as the polemic to disqualifying comments of the authors, are extremely annoying. One of the harmless examples is the description of a football match, …]

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In the above example, the criticism is directed toward the ways and means of argumentation and expression. In other cases, it is related to typography as in: (8) [Topos from the example] Über diese zentralen Kritikpunkte hinaus finden sich zahlreiche ärgerliche Ungenauigkeiten oder einfach Fehler, wenn die Autoren beispielsweise von “Emanuel [sic!] Kant” (5.85) sprechen… [Apart from these central critical points, there are a number of annoying inaccuracies or simply errors, when the authors, for example, speak of “Emanuel [sic!] Kant” (5.85) …]

Or to theory: (9) [Topos from the example] Einige Beispiele zur Illustration. In der Lehrerinformation zur erwähnten Lektion 1 (“Das unbetonte `e`”) wird ausgeführt, dass dieser Laut in den Vorsilben `be-`, `ge-`‚ und `ent-` vorkommt. Die Platzierung der Vorsilbe `ent-` in dieser Reihe ist falsch. [Some examples in a way of illustration. In the information for teachers to the already mentioned Unit 1 (“The unaccented ‘e’”) it is clarified that this sound appears in the prefixes ‘be-’, ‘ge-’, and ‘ent-’. The inclusion of the prefix ‘ent-’ in this group is wrong.]

In English, this topos accounts for 15.5 percent of the cases: (10) However, some of the previous weaknesses continue to exist in this edition, which is rather disappointing. For instance, the writing is still not very reader-friendly and, in fact, is somewhat inaccessible.

Of course, in both languages, many of the topoi from the example are realized through direct citations. Within the group of the topoi from the consequence the most frequent is the topos based on means and goal (17 percent), where criticism is expressed concerning discrepancies between author’s aim and its realization. The latter may concern the overall aim of the publication or certain ‘local’ aims. The following example comes from the very beginning of a review: (11) [Topos based on means and goal] Das vorliegende Buch versteht sich als Einführung […]. Für diese Zielgruppe konstatiert L. A. “eine Lücke im

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deutschen Lehrbuchangebot” (3). Es sei vorweg genommen, dass dieses Buch diese Lücke nicht zu schließen vermag. [The present book is understood as an introduction […]. For this target group L.  A. states that there is a “gap in the offer of German language textbooks” (3). It should be said in advance that this book is not in a position to close this gap.]

While the next one comes from a conclusion: (12) [Topos based on means and goal] Es stellt sich die Frage, was die vorgelegte Arbeit für den Fremdsprachenunterricht bringt. [The question arises as to what the presented book could contribute to the foreign language classroom.]

Example (13) is of a more ‘local’ character: (13) [Topos based on means and goal] Wer nicht bereits ausgiebig textlinguistische Arbeiten studiert hat, wird kaum aus diesen vagen Angaben erschließen können, worum es geht und… [Those, who have not dealt in detail with text linguistic publications, would hardly be able to understand from this vague information what the book is about and…]

In general, discrepancies between aims and realization are discussed much more often globally, i.e., with respect to the whole work. In English, the topos has the frequency of 7 percent: (14) However, due to the brevity of the chapter, there is very little by way of examples, and it is really only a reminder to the reader to use some visuals during the talk.

The cause and effect topoi from the topoi from the consequence group account for 6 percent of the topoi in German and 5 percent in English. They refer either to negative consequences of problematic theoretical assumptions or of errors in the analysis: (15) [Cause and effect topos] Die ungeklärten theoretischen Grundlagen haben ihre Konsequenzen für den praktisch-didaktischen Teil der Arbeit (72–144). [The unsettled theoretical framework has its consequences for the practical-didactic part of the book (72–144).]

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(16) [Cause and effect topos] Probleme in den Übungen resultieren zunächst aus den erwähnten Ungenauigkeiten und Fehlern in den Lehrerinformationen. [Problems in the exercises result first of all from the already mentioned inaccuracies and errors in the information for teachers.] (17) It would be difficult for an EST teacher to try and use the book […] as there does not seem to be any attempt at teaching techniques […].

The topoi from the contrast demonstrate the greatest difference between the two languages under discussion: while they are represented by only 5 percent of the cases in German; in English, they are the largest group and account for 38 percent: (18) [Topos from the contrast] Verständlich ist, dass ein Übungsmaterial für Anfänger nicht theoretisch überfrachtet sein sollte. Grund für Simplifizierungen und Oberflächlichkeit darf das jedoch nicht sein. [It is understandable that exercise materials for beginners should not be theoretically overloaded. This should not, however, be a reason for simplification and superficiality.] (19) If this were just an occasional lapse or aberration, it would not matter much. But this disregard of inconvenient textual features seems to be endemic in the critical approach.

Most of the topoi from the contrast in English are used in criticism of theory and methodology/analysis. Besides, such criticism is often expressed by involving both the reader and the review author in the process of argumentation: (20) Meanwhile, bleary-eyed readers might ask with mounting frustration: if all these would-be “discourse analysts” have got it wrong, when is [X] going to present his own method that sets matters right? This does not expressly occur, as far as I can see, until pages […].

In German, the topoi from the division (classification) (3 percent) and definition (3 percent) are most frequent in the discussion of terminology: (21) [Topos from the division (definition)] Ein zentrales Manko des Buches liegt aber vor allem darin, dass die Autoren keine einleuchtende Definition dessen herleiten, was überhaupt unter ‘Suggestion’ zu verstehen sei.

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[A central deficiency of the book, however, is mainly that the authors do not offer any sensible definition of what should be understood under ‘Suggestion.’] (22) [Topos from the division (classification)] Im Zusammenhang mit der vom Autor gestifteten Kategorie der “ Adversivität” erscheint es weiterhin als problematisch, dass unter diese nicht nur Äußerungshandlungen (nämlich “Drohung” und “Diffamierung”) zusammengefasst werden, sondern zugleich auch Äußerungsmodi (nämlich “Ironie” und “Hohn”). [In connection with the category of “Adversity” introduced by the author it seems further on problematic that it contains not only expression acts (namely “threat” and “defamation”), but also expression modes (namely “irony” and “derision”).]

In English, the ‘classification’ topos is not represented at all, while the ‘definition’ one accounts for 8 percent and relates primarily to terminology; it is often expressed in the form of questions: (23) So there are seven main headings, but how the second group relates to the first is not explained. Nor is the relationship between headings (aspects?, dimensions?, functions?) within the groups. What one wonders […] is the difference between cohesion and text structure.

4.8  Concluding Remarks Going back to Eggs’ (1994, 1996) three types of argumentation depending on the purpose of the speaker, the analysis above shows that it is the epistemic argumentation that dominates review articles. This is not surprising, since academic discourse in general reflects the natural striving of science for the truth and for explanations of phenomena. Deontic argumentation is observed in recommendations where reviewers usually propose alternative, allegedly better ways and means of solving a particular problem. In contrast to other academic genres, deontic argumentation is relatively more frequent due to the evaluative character of reviews. The same holds for ethical argumentation that presupposes the categorization of a claim on the scale of ‘good–bad.’ Although this kind of personalized evaluation clashes in principle with the universal assumption of the objectivity of science, the wide use of topoi from the person in reviews points once again to their highly subjective character. Besides, while evaluation of other scholars’ work is avoided in, e.g., face-to-face academic

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communication (see Vassileva, 2006) due to the danger of being ‘dismissed’ on the spot and lose face in front of a definite audience, in postponed and indirect written communication with its virtual, indistinct, and scattered audience ethical argumentation seems to be fully acceptable. Particularly prominent in this respect is the relatively frequent use of ‘personal attacks’ in English, realized in “scornful, contemptuous, and sarcastic tones” (Tannen, 2002, p. 1664)—a fact that contradicts Galtung’s (1985) observation that the English-speaking academic discourse community is more tolerant than the German-speaking one. This new development is most probably due to the function of English as the world lingua franca of research, the language which is the medium of the ever-­ growing global competition in academia. Another distinction between the two languages under discussion is the fact that while in German the correlation between the topoi based on logical generic premises and those based on conventionalized conclusions is approximately 1:1, in English it is 2:1  in favor of the ‘logical’ topoi. Linguistics is a ‘Geisteswissenschaft’ that does not and cannot always operate with strictly measurable, tangible, and therefore verifiable matter, so it has to rely on logic for securing successful argumentation. The latter is obviously truer for English with its high percentage of ‘argumentation pure’ through topoi from the contrast than for German. This does not mean, however, that German book review discourse is more personalized; on the contrary, English-speaking reviewers are much more derisive and idiosyncratic than their German-speaking colleagues. Besides, German review writers rely much more on authority than English-speaking ones, which is related to the long-standing German tradition of deference and deference to expertise or rather to experts renowned in the field. As already mentioned above, the topoi for means and goal and cause and effect (both topoi from the consequence) predominate within the group of the topoi based on everyday logic generic premises. This fact is directly related to the basic points subjected to criticism in German reviews, namely aim of the publication and (un)successful realization. Knapp-Potthoff (1992, p. 203) points out that in international scientific communication more so than in other types of communication, face-threatening acts and their redress do not operate on the inter-individual level alone, but  – by process of attribution and stereotyping  – tend to have consequences for higher levels of social organization as well.

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I would just mention in this connection that most of the negative reviews in my corpora are produced by scholars endowed with more authority than the reviewed writers. Whether this fact supports Galtung’s (1985) idea that (especially) in the German-speaking academic culture novices experience serious hardships in the process of their integration into the academic community is a problem for further investigations.

References Bakhtin, M. (1981). The dialogic imagination: Four essays (C.  Emerson & M. Holquist, Trans.; M. Holquist, Ed.). University of Texas Press. Bakhtin, M. (1986). Speeh genres and other late essays (Ver W.  McGee, Trans.; C. Emerson & M. Holquist, Eds.). University of Texas press. Bal-Gezegin, B. (2016). A corpus-based investigation of metadiscourse in academic book reviews. Procedia – Social and Behavioral Sciences, 232, 713–718. Becher, T. (1989). Academic tribes and territories: Intellectual inquiry and the cultures of disciplines. SRHE/OUP. Bhatia, V. K. (2004). Worlds of written discourse. Continuum. Candlin, C., & Maley, Y. (1997). Intertextuality and interdiscursivity in the discourse of alternative dispute resolution. In B.-L.  Gunnarson, P.  Linell, & B.  Nordberg (Eds.), The construction of professional discourse (pp.  201–222). Longman. Clark, K., & Holquist, M. (1984). Michail Bakhtin. Harvard University Press. Clyne, M. (1991). The sociocultural dimension: The dilemma of the German-­ speaking scholar. In H.  Schröder (Ed.), Subject-oriented texts (pp.  49–67). de Gruyter. Clyne, M. (1993a). Pragmatik, Textstruktur und kulturelle Werte. Eine interkulturelle Perspektive. In H.  Schröder (Ed.), Fachtextpragmatik (pp.  3–18). Gunter Narr Verlag. Clyne, M. (1993b). Homogene und heterogene Strömungen: Eindrücke aus dem fernen Süden von der deutschen Sprache und dem neuen Europa. In J. Born & G.  Stickel (Eds.), Deutsch als Verkehrssprache in Europa (pp.  2–37). Walter de Gruyter. Diani, G. (2007). The representation of evaluative and argumentative procedures: Examples from the academic book review article. Textus, XX, 37–56. Eggs, E. (1994). Grammaire du discours argumentatif. Kime. Eggs, E. (1996). Formen des Argumentierens in Zeitungskommentaren  – Manipulation durch mehrsträngig-assoziatives Argumentieren? In E.  W. B.  Hess-Lüttich, W.  Holly, & U.  Püschel (Eds.), Textstrukturen im Medienwandel (pp. 179–209). Peter Lang. Fairclough, N. (1989). Language and power. Longman.

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McElholm, D. (2002). Text and argumentation in English for science and technology. Peter Lang. Moreno, A. I., & Suárez, L. (2008). A study of critical attitude across English and Spanish academic book reviews. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, VII(1), 2–7. Moreno, A.  I., & Suárez, L. (2009). Academic book reviews in English and Spanish: Critical comments and rhetorical structure. In K. Hyland & G. Diani (Eds.), Academic evaluation. Review genres in university settings (pp. 161–178). Palgrave Macmillan. Motta-Roth, D. (1996). Investigating connections between text and discourse communities: A cross-disciplinary study of evaluative discourse practices in academic book reviews. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Association for Applied linguistics, 23–26 March 1996, http://www.eric.ed.gov/ ERICDocs/data/eridocs2sql/content_storage_01/0000019b/80/39/ cf/88.pdf. Accessed on 14 Feb 2008. Obeng-Odoom, F. (2014). Why write book reviews? Australian Universities’ Review, 56(1), 78–82. Ong, W. J. (1977). The Writer’s audience is always a fiction. In Interfaces of the word: Studies in the evolution of consciousness and culture (pp. 53–81). Cornell University. Ottmers, C. (1996). Rhetorik. J. B. Metzler Verlag. Pagano, A. (1994). Negatives in written texts. In M. Coulthard (Ed.), Advances in written text analysis (pp. 250–265). Routledge. Pätzold, J. (1984). Beschreibung und Erwerb von Handlungsmustern. Beispiel: Rezensionen wissenschaftlicher Publikationen. Akademie der Wissenschaften der DDR. Reihe A. Arbeitsberichte 138. Phelps, L. (1990). Audience and authorship: The disappearing boundary. In G.  Kirsch & D.  Roen (Eds.), A sense of audience in written communication (pp. 153–174). Sage Publications. Purves, A.  C. (1984). The teacher as reader: An anatomy. College English, 46, 259–265. Römer, U. (2008). Identification impossible? A corpus approach to Realisations of evaluative meaning in academic writing. Functions of Language, XV(1), 115–130. Salager-Meyer, F. (2001). The bittersweet rhetoric of controversiality in 19th- and 20th-century French and English medical literature. Journal of Historical Pragmatics, 2, 141–173. Sanz, R. L. (2009). (Non-) critical voices in the reviewing of history discourse: A cross-cultural study of evaluation. In K. Hyland & G. Diani (Eds.), Academic evaluation. Review genres in university settings (pp.  143–160). Palgrave Macmillan. Shaw, P. (2004). How do we recognise implicit evaluation in academic book reviews? In G. Del Lungo Camiciotti & E. Tognini Bonelli (Eds.), Academic discourse – New insights into evaluation (pp. 121–140). Peter Lang.

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Shaw, P. (2009). The lexis and grammar of explicit evaluation in academic book reviews, 1913 and 1993. In K. Hyland & G. Diani (Eds.), Academic evaluation. Review genres in university settings (pp. 217–235). Palgrave Macmillan. Simon, L. (1996). The pleasures of book reviewing: Suggestions for how to get started as a book reviewer, when one should not review a particular book and how the review publication process works. Journal of Scholarly Publishing. North York: Jul 1996, 27(4), 237–241. Spink, A., Robins, D., & Schamber, L. (1998). Use of scholarly book reviews: Implications for electronic publishing and scholarly communication. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 49(4), 364–374. Swales, J. (2004). Research genres. Exploration and applications. Cambridge University Press. Tannen, D. (2002). Agonism in academic discourse. Journal of Pragmatics, 34, 1651–1669. Tomlinson, B. (1990). Ong may be wrong: Negotiating with nonfictional readers. In G. Kirsch & D. Roen (Eds.), A sense of audience in written communication (pp. 85–98). Sage Publications. Van Eemeren, F. H. (1996). Fundamentals of argumentation theory. Erlbaum. Vassileva, I. (2006). Author-audience interaction. A cross-cultural perspective. Asgard Verlag. Vassileva, I. (2010). Critical book reviews in German. International Journal of Applied Linguistics, 20(3), 354–367. Ventola, E. (1999). Semiotic spanning at conferences: Cohesion and coherence in and across conference papers and their discussions. In W. Bublitz, U. Lenk, & E. Ventola (Eds.), Coherence in spoken and written discourse (pp. 1–35). John Benjamins. Volosinov, V. N. (1973). Marxism and the philosophy of language (L. Matejka & I. R. Titunik, Trans.). Seminar Press. Generally attributed to M. M. Bakhtin. Wiegand, H.  E. (1983). Nachdenken über wissenschaftliche Rezensionen. Deutsche Sprache, 11, 122–137. Wiley, M.  V. (1993). How to read a book: Reflections on the ethics of book reviewing. The Journal of Advanced Composition, 13(2), 477–492. Accessed at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20865928 Wills, W. (1997). Hedges in expert-language reviews. In R.  Markkanen & H.  Schröder (Eds.), Hedging and discourse: Approaches to the analysis of a pragmatic phenomenon in academic texts (pp. 134–147). Walter de Gruyter.

CHAPTER 5

The ‘Academic War’: A Case Study

Abstract  This chapter focuses on the above-mentioned ‘academic war’ and deals with review articles only in English. Here, the modern theory of argumentation schemes is used, where of special interest is Walton et al.’s (Argumentation Schemes. Cambridge University Press, 2008, p. 220–275) “pragmatic theory of refutation” with its differentiation among “attack, opposition, rebuttal, and refutation” (p. 220) that are all basic notions to critical argumentation. The most important observations from this part of the study elicit several most outstanding characteristic features of the ‘academic war’ under investigation. Firstly, the premises criticism is based on are of predominantly content-­ oriented, theoretical character or are concerned with the validity of the analysis. This focus on content is primarily directed by the aim of the publications, namely, to refute crucial theoretical claims put forward by the opponent(s). Secondly, the language is highly personalized, i.e., the authors resort not only to the first person singular, thus expressing their own opinion, but also constantly try to involve the audience in the process of

A shorter version of part of this chapter, including graphs and tables, has been published in: Vassileva, Irena (2022). An ‘academic war’ – A case study of confrontation in academia. Journal of English for Academic Purposes 57(1):101115. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jeap.2022.101115 © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 I. Vassileva, Confrontation in Academic Communication, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-32736-0_5

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argumentation through extensive use of the inclusive ‘we’ and, even more untypical of the written mode of presentation—the direct address (‘you’). Thirdly, in terms of the argumentation schemes analyzed in the study, the fact that the refutations dominate overwhelmingly is not surprising at all, considering the goals and nature of the discourse. There is also abundant use of questions/‘questioning the premises and/or the conclusions’—a feature of this discourse that is more typical of the spoken mode of academic communication. Finally, a distinctive feature of the means of argumentation observed in the corpus is the employment of a lot of metaphors and irony, as well as argumentation schemes such as personal attacks, direct interaction with the reader, ‘preaching’ ethics of intellectual enquiry, story-telling elements, etc., all of them being quite far from logical argumentation proper, usually expected in academic publications. Keywords  ‘Academic war’ • Modern theory of argumentation schemes • Refutations • Personal attack

5.1   Aim and Material of the Case Study The aim of this case study is to look more closely at the argumentation strategies (or schemes) used by writers belonging to two different schools of linguistics in their attempt to refute the theoretical, methodological, ideological, etc. approaches of the ‘enemy’ group in order to promote their own viewpoints instead. Hunston (2005, p. 2) refers to such publications as “conflict articles.” I have chosen to call this kind of exchange metaphorically an ‘academic war’ here, since the fierce debate has been going on for years, in corroboration with Hunston (2005, p. 2) who states that “the conflict exchange has no defined end; any number of articles may respond to each other”. Besides, as the analysis below will show, the language/linguistic means used by the respective proponents of the two schools may often be considered to diverge significantly from the general understanding of ‘collegiality’ in academic communication. In this sense, the material discussed in this part of the study differs considerably from that of the academic book reviews addressed in the previous chapter. The corpus thus consists of 12 texts containing altogether 70,771 words, mainly reviews and review articles of particular publications, as well as some ‘overview’ articles, and actually constitutes a chain of opinion

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exchanges (see Source texts). The two schools of linguistics involved are among the leading ones at present and have attracted a large number of followers both in their theoretical orientation and, ever more frequently, in their practical applications. Therefore, it seemed to me of importance to attempt at an analysis of this ‘academic war’ without, of course, aiming at any predictions as to its outcome, since parallel and often contradictory trends in the field have always existed, but have probably never fought for a place in the sun with such viciousness.

5.2  Methodology of the Investigation The methodology of this part of the study is based on the modern theory of argumentation schemes defined by Walton et al. (2008, p. 1) as: Forms of argument (structures of inference) that represent structures of common types of arguments […]. They include the deductive and inductive forms of argument that we are already so familiar with in logic. However, they also represent forms of argument that are neither deductive nor inductive, but that fall into a third category, sometimes called defeasible, presumptive or abductive.

The latter type of arguments was treated as fallacious by logic for a long time. In practice, though, such arguments turn out to be very frequent and successful to be simply ignored by labeling them ‘fallacious.’ They are defeasible or fallible, in the sense that new evidence may be provided later that shows that the conclusion does not hold true. Walton (2010, p. 160) summarizes: Studies of fallacies in argumentation and informal logic have mainly taken a normative approach, by seeing fallacies as arguments that violate standards of how an argument should properly be used in rational thinking or arguing. However, fallacies also have a psychological dimension. They are illusions and deceptions that we as human thinkers are prone to. They are said to be arguments that seem valid but are not (Hamblin, 1970, 12).

The distinction between fallacious and non-fallacious argumentation is an ongoing issue in logic and argumentation theory which I am not going to pursue in detail here. Suffice it to mention that most common fallacies in academic texts that have also been detected in the investigated corpus here are: ‘argumentum ad hominem’ (from the person) with all its

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variations, ‘argumentum ad verecundiam’ (from authority), appeal to emotion, as well as a couple of others with lesser frequency. In their comprehensive study of argumentation schemes, Walton et al. (2008) present a detailed analysis of a wide variety of schemes, relate them to ancient and modern theories of rhetoric, and offer a compendium of 60 schemes, some of which are used in the current investigation, being relevant to the analysis of academic communication. Of special interest here, however, is Walton et al.’s (2008, p. 220–275) “pragmatic theory of refutation” which I shall dwell on in more detail since it is directly related to the investigation of confrontation. The authors distinguish among “attack, opposition, rebuttal, and refutation” (p. 220) that are all basic notions to critical argumentation. The need for critical argumentation arises where there is conflict of opinions between two (or more) parties: A refutation is defined as a sequence of dialogue moves in which an argument is used by one party to attack and defeat an opposed argument put forward previously by the other party. […] A rebuttal is an argument that is opposed to another argument […] but it does not necessarily refute that argument. Refutation is something more powerful [in that] it overpowers the original argument and knocks it down (defeats it). (Ibid., p. 220)

The “three-ways hypothesis” states that “there are only three ways of attacking (and refuting) an argument. [1] to argue that the premises are not true; [… 2] to argue that the conclusion does not follow from the premises; and [3] to argue that the conclusion is false” (ibid., p. 222). In the first case, one may argue that the premise is false or may cast doubt on the premise by questioning it (p.  272). Refutation is considered to be successful “if the opposed argument is stro nger than the original one” (p. 268). Rebuttals, on their part, may be combined to achieve an “additive effect,” thus forming “a refutation that can be stronger than any of its component rebuttals” (ibid., p. 263). To put it succinctly, “A proposition is strongly refuted if proven to be false; A proposition is weakly refuted if not shown to be true” (ibid., p.  267). Thus, this modern approach is much more fine-grained as compared to traditional and widely accepted models such as Toulmin’s (1958), or Perelman & Olbrechts-Tyteca’s (1969), which makes it better applicable to the analysis in the present study. Besides, in contrast to the purely semantic definitions of ‘argument’ as a set of statements (propositions) with a particular structure

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(premises–conclusion), within the pragmatic approach suggested by Walton (1996) and further developed in Walton et  al. (2008, p.  269), “argumentation is defined as a chaining together of statements in a sequence of reasoning used for some purpose in a context of dialogue.” Further on, the authors state: Some arguments are merely hypothetical, meaning that the premises are merely assumptions, and no attempt is made to prove the conclusion using them as evidence. Other arguments are meant to prove the conclusions by using the premises as evidence. In such a case, we say that the argument is used to fulfil a probative function. […] The probative function refers to the use of an argument by one participant in a dialogue to remove the doubt or disagreement of a respondent, by using premises the respondent is already committed to. Thus, the probative function of an argument is a pragmatic characteristic. It relates not just to the truth or falsity of the premises and conclusions, […], but to how that argument was used for some purpose by its proponent in a dialogue. The term ‘argumentation’ is often used, as opposed to ‘argument’, to indicate this pragmatic approach. (Ibid., pp. 268–269)

5.3   Chronological Development of the ‘Academic War’ Around Critical Discourse Analysis At the onset of the academic war under consideration came Norman Fairclough’s extremely influential book Discourse and Social Change (Polity Press, 1992) 1 which set the grounding principles of a whole new school in modern linguistics, namely ‘Critical Discourse Analysis’ (hereinafter CDA). The book was viciously criticized in a review by Henry Widdowson (1995a), followed by an article-length criticism of the whole enterprise of CDA in the same year (Widdowson, 1995b). A year later (in 1996), the two authors exchanged views in the same issue of the Language and Literature journal (Fairclough, 1996; Widdowson, 1996). In 1997 Toolan offered a critical but supportive lengthy overview (10,000 words) of the developments in CDA theory and practice. In the meantime, CDA found numerous followers, which led to the publication of a number of articles and several books. The latter were unfavorably scrutinized by Widdowson (1998) in an extensive ‘review article.’ In 2000, Blommaert and Bulcaen provided an exhaustive survey of CDA and pointed out some problematic issues concerning mainly the necessity for CDA to widen the 1

 The references in this part are presented in the Appendix: Source Texts

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scope of analytical instruments and theoretical sources. Provoked by Widdowson’s (2004) article in “Applied Linguistics” (not included in the analysis here), Robert de Beaugrande (2001) struck back with an interpretation of “the Discourse of H. G. Widdowson” (2001, p. 104). With the publication of his seminal book Text, Context, Pretext: Critical Issues in Discourse Analysis (Oxford: Blackwell) in 2004, Widdowson became himself a ‘target’ of criticism—the book incited a number of reviews (besides being quoted in a still larger number of other publications), starting with Beaugrade’s (2004) excoriating review article and followed by (at least the two analyzed here) more descriptive but still critical reviews by Tian (2004) and Hauser (2006). The last and most recent article considered in the present study (Poole, 2010) “examines the theoretical foundations of Fairclough’s CDA” and “summarizes and evaluates arguments put by critics of CDA” (Poole, 2010, p. 137). This brief chronological overview demonstrates the fact that the ‘academic war’ under investigation started in 1995 and is probably still going on. Of course, the present analysis does not pretend to be exhaustive in terms of the material included, in the sense that there are certainly other reviews published, and the issues have been discussed in other types of publications (genres) as well. The corpus includes publications by leading representatives of the two opposing camps, on the one hand, and such that have been published in leading international journals, on the other. The two books mentioned above (Fairclough’s, 1992; Widdowson’s, 2004) are not directly subjected to analysis here but frequent references to them are unavoidable.

5.4  General Statistical Data In what is to follow, I shall shortly present the general statistical data concerning the length of the articles, their authors, and the distribution in terms of belonging to the two ‘camps,’ which I shall call here “pro-CDA” (6 articles) and “anti-CDA” (6 articles) (Table 5.1). As the data in Table 5.2 show, in spite of the equal number of articles in each group, the opponents of CDA have been much more prolific, with H. G. Widdowson having been the ‘lone fighter’ for the first five years. Of course, this may be attributed to the appearance of a number of other books and articles by followers of CDA where the respective authors have substantiated their theoretical and practical approach, thus making special publications in answer to attacks on CDA redundant.

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Table 5.1  Overall length of articles

Pro-CDA Anti-CDA Sum total

Running words

Average number of words per author

28,109 42,662 70,771

4684 7110 5898

Table 5.2  Length of articles per author in chronological order Pro-CDA Author Fairclough 1996 Toolan 1997 de Beaugrande 2001 de Beaugrande 2004 Tian 2004 Hauser 2006

N of words 3513 10,000 8000 4115 1525 956

Anti-CDA Author Widdowson 1995a Widdowson 1995b Widdowson 1996 Widdowson 1998 Bloomaert & Bulcaen 2000 Poole 2010

N of words 3249 7633 6332 7861 8950 8637

It has to be mentioned here that the longest articles (Toolan, 1997; Bloomaert & Bulcaen, 2000; Poole 2010) represent extensive overviews of existing trends in the field rather than criticism pure. The latter observation holds true of the shortest articles which are actually book reviews per se (Tian, 2004; Hauser, 2006). Nevertheless, the importance of the discussion around CDA is demonstrated not only by the fact that the above texts are published in some of the most prestigious journals in the field but also by the fact that in spite of their ‘review’ character they have (almost exclusively) article length, which is an exception to the usual practices of the respective journals. Besides, as the time and order of publications show, the authors were given ‘immediate access’ to publication without the customary long waiting periods.

5.5  Premises As already mentioned in Chap. 4, the expression of criticism may be based on different premises—theoretical assumptions, methodological failures, relevance of data, etc. In contrast to the data in Chap. 4, however, the ‘academic war’ corpus, contain only part of the premises discussed in connection with the book reviews. From the form-oriented premises, there are only several occurrences of criticism of expression, while there are no

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Theory Analysis Terminology Expression Graph 5.1  Distribution of the premises

references to typography, layout, or structure. As to the content-oriented premises, only three types were observed, namely theory, terminology, and analysis. Graph 5.1. thus shows the distribution of all the four types of premises in percent. The data show that in almost half of the instances (47 percent) the critical argumentation schemes refer to contentious theoretical issues. Problematic definitions and use of terminology account for another 20 percent of the cases. Thus, it is obvious that the main differences between the two ‘camps’ lie in variations and/or discrepancies of theoretical character, which is no wonder considering the fact that we are dealing here with representatives of different schools of linguistic thought that struggle for recognition and domination. The critical argumentation schemes related to problematic analyses (24 percent) are mainly concerned with proving the analyses of the opponent(s) wrong and, in some cases, suggesting ‘right’ interpretations of the same data or (not so often) theory. I am not going to adduce examples of the first three types of premises here since there are enough illustrations of them in Sect. 5.7.2. Criticism of ways and means of expression, which is an almost compulsory part of an academic book review, are seldom in this corpus (9 percent) and are of a basically different character: (24) Compared to ‘assume’, the contextual range of the Noun and Verb stem ‘claim’, at 19 attestations, is even more drastic. Not only it is never used with Widdowson as agent, but the ‘claims’ are unsubtly made to sound phoney, especially in: […]. (de Beaugradnde, 2001)

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What de Beaugrande actually criticizes here is the meaning invested in certain linguistic devices used by his opponent, not the form or the style of expression. Besides, in the whole corpus, there is only one instance of pointing out to errata: (25) Still to be desired is the errata that should be made. They are found on pp.21 (‘used’ to ‘is used’), 101 (‘note 5’ to ‘note 6’), 102 (‘isolation’ to ‘in isolation’), 137 (‘simple’ to ‘simply’), and 160 (‘note 3’ to ‘note 4’). (Tian, 2004, p. 6)

5.6  Topoi Graph 5.2 below shows the frequency of the topoi observed in the corpus in percent. Topos from the Person It was no surprise to find out that the most frequently used topos in the corpus was the topos from the person, accounting for more than half of all the topoi (57 percent). The ‘leading’ pronoun is, of course, the first person singular ‘I’, as in the following paragraph where ‘I’ is the subject of almost every sentence: (26) How do I know all these things? Obviously because I have been socialised into a particular reality and know how to use language to engage indexically with it. I recognise a piece of language as a text not because of its linguistic size, but because I assume it is intended to key into this reality. Texts can come in all shapes and sizes: they can correspond in extent with any linguistic Person Contrast Exemplification Authority Cause & effect Graph 5.2  Frequency of the topoi

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unit: letter, sound, word, sentence, combination of sentences. To put the matter more briskly, I identify a text not by its linguistic extent but its social intent. (Widdowson, 1995b)

In Vassileva (2000), I have identified 12 types of micro-speech acts where the ‘I’ perspective is employed in research articles. In the present study, however, I have not counted the occurrences of ‘I’ (or any of the other pronouns) since I have chosen the argumentation scheme as a unit of analysis and one argumentation scheme may (and usually does) contain more than one micro-speech act defined in terms of the 2000 book. Nevertheless, without going into statistical details, I have to say that the present corpus demonstrates a much larger number of instances of ‘I’ (as well as of ‘we’ and ‘you’), if compared to the data from the research articles. The prevailing number of occurrences is observed, as expected, in argumentation schemes based on theoretical, terminological, and analytical premises. However, in contrast to research articles, the corpus contains quite a few ‘storytelling’ elements relating personal experience—both ‘practical’ (as in the example above) and professional: (27) Having myself published at least three thick volumes (also posted for free on the Internet and nowhere mentioned by Widdowson) that utterly belie these reproofs (Beaugrande, 1991, 1997, 2004) I am frankly gobsmacked. I have presented […]. Using only the tools of discourse analysis, I  have grappled with such intellectual uncertainties as […], and resolved, I believe, the superiority of the latter; I have confronted opposing paradigms inside and outside linguistics; and I have always insisted that the hardest problems for discourse analysis are just beginning to reach full force. And for the record, my new book (2004, Ch. III) applies a Halliday-style lexicogrammar to exactly 701 samples of authentic texts, which Widdowson, citing mostly just the Preface of Halliday’s (1994) Introduction, maintains cannot be done at all; Halliday (1973) himself famously did so for Golding’s The Inheritors, which was a seminal inspiration piece for many, myself included. (de Beaugrande, 2004)

The ‘we’ perspective is also more frequently used than in research articles with its most important function of involving the audience in the process of argumentation. From all the authors under investigation here, H. G. Widdowson is probably the one making the most (sometimes excessive) use of both the ‘we’ and the ‘you’ perspective. One of the interesting

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ways of employing ‘we’ could be considered as a means of introducing citations and/or pointing out shortcomings of the opponent: (28) But if it is not lexis which is the defining feature, then what is? We are told that ‘most reason clauses are in the medical voice.’ Some are, then, and some are not. Which is which? We are not told, but unless we know what makes a reason clause medical as distinct from lifeworld, there is no way of knowing that the particular clause we are considering (‘since small women on the whole have a slightly smaller pelvis than tall women’) is ‘far more typical of the extract as a whole’ than the phrase ‘which is not surprising.’ What is it that makes it typical? We have no way of knowing because the type is left unspecified. We are told that [...]. (Widdowson, 1996, p. 64)

In the above paragraph, Widdowson uses an argumentation scheme consisting of constant question-raising and based on topoi from the contrast in addition to that from the person. This is an extremely attention-­ grabbing argumentation technique since the author is thus able to actually involve all three parties: himself covertly as the one posing the questions, the audience through the inclusive ‘we,’ and the author of the publication discussed as the agent of the passive construction. Another stylistic ‘trick’ Widdowson often utilizes is the switch of perspective—in the example below from the ‘we’ to the even more direct ‘you’: (29) What we mean pragmatically is only in part a function, of what the language means semantically. […] Obviously we need to take note of these limits, but we are not bound by them: they are not so much inhibiting constraints as facilitating conditions. The pragmatic significance we achieve [...]. You cannot read what people mean directly from the texts they produce. The definition of language as social semiotic can tell you about the meaning of texts as exemplification of the semantic categories in lexis and grammar, but it cannot of its nature tell you about the discourse that the texts are used to achieve. (Widdowson, 1995b, p. 166)

Although it is difficult to say why the author has chosen to switch the perspective, one could assume that the ‘we’ is used in the discussion of more theoretical issues at the beginning of the paragraph, while the ‘you’ should convince the reader of the possibility/impossibility of applying theory to practice.

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In the following example, Widdowson engages in a direct dialogue with the reader and even reinforces his immediate appeal by marking the second-person pronouns in the text in italics: (30) You may deem me to have said or written something disrespectful, or rude, or ironic or racially biased, but to do so, you have to make assumptions about my intentions, which, in accordance with normal pragmatic practice, can only be partially signalled in the text. These assumptions are naturally and inevitably made on the basis of your conception of the world, your social and individual reality, your values, beliefs and prejudices. […]. It is your discourse you read into my text. You can only interpret it by relating it to your reality. Where  your reality corresponds to mine, or where  you are prepared to cooperate in seeing things my way, then there can be convergence between intention and interpretation. Otherwise, there will be a disparity. You will be taking me out of context  – out of the context of my reality. (Widdowson, 1995b, p. 165)

Topos from the Contrast The topos from the contrast comes second in frequency with 21 percent and, naturally, reflects the confrontative character of the discussion. Since in the analysis of argumentation schemes below (6.7.), I adduce a number of examples based on this topos, I shall just note here that it appears in practically all types of schemes and its function is, as one would expect, to contradict, dismiss, oppose, offer an alternative, play down, etc. the claim(s) of the opponent(s). Topos from the Exemplification Exemplification (10 percent) is resorted to mainly in two cases: either to quote examples from publications of the opponent(s) in order to refute their claims or to introduce counter-examples (much less frequently): (31) Actually, Chouliaraki and Fairclough (1999, p.  56) do address this issue, although without providing a full explanation. They write: ‘there is no closed “list” of genres or discourses, and there are relatively few that have stable names.’ No examples of such ‘stable names’ are offered, however, and readers can only speculate whether ‘relatively few’ means less than ten, a few dozen, or a hundred. (Poole, 2010, p. 146) (32) In parallel, he argues that Halliday’s ‘grammar’ must be more theoretical and further from real texts than Halliday himself maintains. Significantly, not Halliday but Stubbs (1994, p.  203) is called to witness the ‘Hallidayan

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assumption that all linguistic usage encodes representations of the world.’ This ‘assumption’ is a gross exaggeration and my own studies of Halliday’s works (e.g., Beaugrande 1991) convince me that he assumes no such thing. He has in fact said, for example: 20 the ‘slices of meaning’ which ‘the categories of our language represent’ may not ‘correspond to our conscious structuring of the world on creatures and things’ (1985, p. xxv). (de Beaugrande 2001)

Topos from the Authority The topos from the authority (8 percent) is relatively rare in the corpus and serves its traditional purpose of supporting the author’s claims by introducing the (same or similar) opinion of an authority in the field: (33) The implication of this is that a categorical opposition between science (or theory) and ideology cannot be sustained—even the purest of science may work ideologically (Ashmore et al. 1994). (Fairclough, 1996) (34) Unfortunately, as O’Dwyer (2007, p. 374) suggests, it can be argued that some ‘CDA advocates . . . veer confusedly between cultural theory and linguistics in their understanding of discourse.’ (Poole, 2010, p. 142)

The above examples represent the so-called fallacy of argumentum ad verecundiam, since only very short, specific claims of other authors are taken out of their larger contexts and introduced in support of the writers’ assertions. Topos from Cause and Effect This is, somewhat surprisingly, the least frequent topos (8 percent) employed mainly to refute false premises: (35) We should note again, however, a possible confusion creeping in here. CDA aims at explaining not how social inequalities are reflected or created in language itself, as social semiotic, but in the use of language as social action. You cannot explain how people express their ideology by assuming in advance that ideology is already fixed in the language. (Widdowson, 1995b, p. 168)

5.7   Analysis of Critical Argumentation Schemes 5.7.1   Critical Argumentation Schemes: Overview The overall number of instances of openly critical argumentation schemes in the whole corpus is 292, where there are 119 used by the

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representatives of the pro-CDA group and 173 used by the anti-CDA authors. Of course, the distribution of the schemes is unequal and depends both on the length of the particular article and on individual authors’ style. Table 5.3 lists the number of critical argumentation schemes for each author in chronological order. In view of the definition of “argumentation scheme” adopted in the present study, namely as a chain of arguments, one should keep in consideration that some of the above schemes consist of phrases or clauses only, while others are longer than a paragraph. Moreover, the critical force of an argumentation scheme depends also strongly on the language means used for its realization, as will be demonstrated by the detailed analysis and examples below. Table 5.3 shows that there is little correlation between the length of the text and the number of critical argumentation schemes— individual author’s aim, degree of commitment to a cause, authority in the field, and last but not least, idiosyncratic manner of expression are the predominant factors playing a role in the representation of criticism. 5.7.2   Types of Critical Argumentation Schemes Graph 5.3 shows the percentage of the various types of argumentation schemes found in the corpus. As the graph demonstrates, the refutations (false premises—17 percent, questioning the premises and/or the conclusion—17 percent, the Table 5.3  Number of critical argumentation schemes for each author in chronological order Author Widdowson 1995a Widdowson 1995b Fairclough 1996 Widdowson 1996 Toolan 1997 Widdowson 1998 Bloomaert & Bulcaen 2000 de Beaugrande 2001 de Beaugrande 2004 Tian 2004 Hauser 2006 Poole 2010

Number of critical argumentation schemes/ Number of words 24 43 18 32 36 46 9 40 22 2 4 16

3249 7633 3513 6332 10,000 7861 8950 8000 4115 1525 956 8637

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Defeasible Assumption Rebuttal Pers. Attack False premises Questioning Concl. Versus premises Probation Graph 5.3  Types of argumentation schemes

conclusion does not follow the premises—22 percent, probation—8 percent, and personal attack—11 percent) constitute 75 percent of the argumentation schemes used in the corpus. I have added a new category to the refutations enumerated by Walton et al. (2008), namely ‘personal attack,’ since I have discovered criticism that could hardly be named ‘argumentative,’ consisting solely of assaults (often ironically expressed) on the ‘enemy,’ as in the following example: (36) Imagine if you will a most peculiar game of bowling. One contestant is the sole bowler; the others are all human bowling pins. And instead of an array of pins in the centre of the “alley”, just one human pin at a time is set up in the “gutter” where the bowler cannot fail to knock it down. And so he does, on and on, with evident relish in his underpinned mastery. Such a game seems to me a not altogether unfitting metaphor for H.G.  Widdowson’s (2004) latest and largest—and, one ardently hopes, last—assault on “(Critical) Discourse Analysis.” Some of the targets are familiar from his “past ten years” (page x) of fulminations, which he esteemed highly enough to have collected in a special volume, Controversies in Applied Linguistics (Seidlhofer [ed.], 2003), and he frankly calls the new book “confrontational and uncompromising” (“waspish” would have been my word). (de Beaugrande 2004, p. 1)

Both the metaphor at the beginning and the lexis used later on in the extract sound not simply critical but truly aggressive. At the same time, none of the traditionally recognized argumentation schemes is employed

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to provide for the credibility of the author’s claims. On the contrary, what is observed here is the informal fallacy argumentum ad hominem. In what is to follow, I shall discuss in detail the argumentation schemes enumerated above, starting from those with the lowest frequency outside the group of ‘refutations.’ Rebuttals Starting off with the rebuttals (weak forms of refutation), unlike in other text types, including other academic genres, they account for only 3 percent of the argumentation schemes in the corpus. Practically all of them appear in the articles of the ‘general review’ type, refer to theory or terminology, the statements are hedged (underlined here) and have the function of a recommendation rather than criticism: (37) But elsewhere I sometimes feel that theorization and global contextualizations are making the business of critical reading seem much more difficult than it needs to be, and are also making analysts’ actual engagements with texts less thorough than they need to be. (Toolan, 1997, p. 94) (38) In Chapter 1, Widdowson argues for a conceptual distinction to be made between ‘text’ and ‘discourse.’ While one cannot disagree with the necessity of making this distinction, the definition of the two terms is not entirely convincing. (Hauser, 2006, p. 813)

In other words, rebuttals play a minor role in the kind of discussion considered in this study, and one may conclude that they are argumentation schemes that are not typical of the discourse of an ‘academic war’ due to the weakness of their claims. Defeasible Argumentation Schemes Since these argumentation schemes presuppose that new evidence can be provided to refute their conclusion, they come second in terms of low frequency (5 percent) in the corpus: (39) Yet Fairclough’s CDA appears to carry dangers and drawbacks, which I enumerate below: • The term ‘discourse’ is variously defined, and is sometimes glossed in shorthand as language’. […]

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• The theoretical underpinning of CDA relies on a wide variety of influences, but it is not clear that, together, these form a coherent whole. • CDA does not appear to confront the problem that all readers interpret a given text in different ways. • CDA appears to adopt too deterministic a view of the effect on readers of particular textual features (such as nominalization). • CDA does not make sufficient use of psycholinguistic evidence (Stubbs 1997; O’Halloran 2003). (Poole, 2010, p. 151–152) (40) I cannot help suspecting that some of the objections from stylisticians have emerged for the very particular reason that provocative sociological CDA seems to threaten to make stylistics—even ‘the new stylistics’—obsolete. (Toolan, 1997, p. 84)

Similarly to rebuttals, defeasibles also appear in review articles and demonstrate an abundance of hedging devices whose function is to insure the author against possible criticism due to the emergence of new evidence. As the examples show, the most frequently used hedging devices are the verbs seem and appear, as well as semantically indefinite determiners and adverbs. Аrgumentation Schemes Whose Premises Are Merely Assumptions Voicing assumptions (17 percent) comes next in terms of strength of the argumentation scheme. These schemes usually express doubt and point out to inconsistencies and/or insufficiencies in theory and use of terminology and definitions without claiming ‘the ultimate truth.’ (41) Nor would I be so confident, when it comes to changing people’s attitudes or patterns of ‘reading,’ about what means to use and what kinds of text to interrogate. (Toolan, 1997, p. 88) (42) But before that I should like to suggest one general means by which critical discourse analyses could become more compelling. This might arise if they included a clear sense of how a particular control-revealing, hegemony-­ eliciting, manipulative text might have been constructed, so as to more nearly attain the status of being a non-manipulative and non-hegemonic text. (Toolan, 1997, p. 88–89)

The first example above concerns the manner of analysis; the second one proposes an extension of theory. Both are exponents of a topos from

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the person, which is clearly indicated by the use of the first person singular, which also acts as a hedging device. The abundance of hedging, however, serves to avoid for the argumentation to be accused of representing the informal fallacy ‘argumentum ad hominem.’ The following example shows some different characteristics: (43) Van Dijk notes that the metaphor here explicitly signals where the paper stands on the issue of immigration and confirms its right-wing position. Nobody, I imagine, would want to quarrel with that. However, there are features of the text following the headline which, on the face of it, are not consistent with this bias. (Widdowson, 1998, p. 143)

Here, the author uses a topos from the contrast and a topos from the person simultaneously to suggest a different analysis of data provided by the reviewed writer. He also engages the audience in the process of argumentation, thus looking for confirmation of his own point of view. Another example by the same author shows his inclination to engage the reader, even by addressing him/her directly: (44) But if you know the provenance of a particular text (the Sun newspaper, for example) you will obviously, as a matter of rudimentary pragmatic fact, position yourself accordingly and be primed to find confirmation of your own prejudice. Your analysis will be the record of whatever partial interpretation suits your own agenda. (Widdowson, 1998, p. 148)

Of course, the second-person pronoun could also be treated as standing for ‘one,’ but the very fact that Widdowson chooses to use it over and over again points to his desire to trigger interactivity with the audience, which is, as a rule, a feature of spoken rather than written academic discourse. (see, e.g., Vassileva, 2006 on spoken academic discourse) In a co-authored overview article, on the other hand, ‘assumption’ is expressed in a neutral way where author identity is not given prominence to: (45) At the same time, CDA may benefit from the critical potential of these related developments in order to remedy some of its theoretical and methodological weaknesses, notably those related to the treatments of context in CDA.  The latter is arguably the biggest methodological issue faced by CDA. (Blommaert & Bulcaen, 2000, p. 460)

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Refutations As mentioned above, a refutation may be realized in three ways: 1. By proving that the premises of an argument are either not true, or are questioned 2. By proving that the conclusion does not follow the premises 3. By proving that the conclusion is false When the premises of the opponent are used to prove that the conclusion is false, this is termed ‘probation.’ The present corpus includes cases of questioning the premises (17 percent), declaring the premises false (17 percent), claiming that the conclusion does not follow the premises, including the cases of false conclusions (22 percent), and probation (8 percent). Questioning the Premises In the prevailing number of cases, the premises that are questioned are of theoretical character. Often the questions are piled up one after the other, as in: (46) The three aspects obviously invite comparison with Halhday’s three macrofunctions of language. The ldeational is common to both, but the other two are included within the Halliday interpersonal function. What theoretical grounds there might be for the finer distinction is not made clear. And what of Halliday’s third function, namely the textual? This, says Fairclough, ‘can be usefully added to my list.’ This seems a little casual and hardly seems to suit the discourse of academic argument. Why is it useful? List of what? This function surely needs some theoretical justification. Are there then four, and not three, aspects? And if the textual function is not an aspect, what is it? Where does it fit in? It is surely not a matter of the function being usefully added to a list, but of being essentially integrated into a theory. (Widdowson, 1995a, p. 511)

In the above paragraph, more than half of the sentences are interrogatory, demonstrating actually the author’s disagreement with theoretical issues in the reviewed book. The use of such ‘rhetorical questions’ has also been noticed by Hunston (2005, p. 3), as well as “overt reference to the writers themselves (we, us)” (ibid.) as means of securing interaction with the readers. In a number of cases, the same author involves the reader(s)

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in the process of argumentation, interestingly enough, by both addressing them directly and including them through the use of the first-person plural, within one argumentation scheme of questioning the premises: (47) What kind of theory is this, we might wonder, which is profligate with terms whose conceptual significance is uncertain, but perversely does not make a terminological distinction to mark what is obviously, and acknowledged to be, matter of crucial conceptual importance? On a number of occasions in the book, Fairclough makes the point that significance, ideological implication, and so on cannot be just read out of the text. That is to say, interpretation is not a semantic but a pragmatic matter—you do not read meanings out of a text, but into a text. But then we need a theory of some kind […]. (Widdowson, 1995a, p. 515)

The following example demonstrates a case where the author not only questions the premises but makes a suggestion (assumption) about how to solve the problematic issues: (48) But who is not politically opposed to sexism, racism, and discrimination? How could one have much intellectual respect for anyone who did not favour equity, justice and liberation? In fact, do we have any reliable grounds for doubting that the majority of people share these beliefs? This is why I suggest there is nothing new or interesting in CDA politics. Nor does there have to be, since I do not believe we go to CDA for political analysis. (Toolan, 1997, p. 100)

In this example, the author builds his argument on a topos from the contrast; he starts off with the neutral ‘one/anyone’ to switch to reader-­ involving ‘we’ and eventually ends up by expressing his own belief from the first-person singular. Question-raising may also be combined with irony: (49) Meanwhile, bleary-eyed readers might ask with mounting frustration: if all these would-be “discourse analysts” have got it wrong, when is Widdowson going to present his own method that sets matters aright? This does not expressly occur, as far as I can see, until pages 169–171 (the book has x+ 174 pages): […]. (de Beaugrande, 2004)

In this complex argumentation scheme, the author also involves the readers, as in the examples above, but in a different, ironic way, at the same time using a topos from the person in his ‘answer’ to the question.

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Notably, the argumentation scheme of ‘question raising’ does not appear in all texts under discussion. That is, some authors like H. G. Widdowson make use of an abundance of these schemes while others avoid them altogether. False Premises Refuting the premises of the discussed author is almost exclusively confined to theory/theoretical premises. This scheme may be realized by using a topos from the authority as in: (50) Widdowson merely remarks in passing that ‘some linguists, of course, never accepted them anyway.’ The field is thus being radically reduced and impoverished by ignoring its venerable traditions of research in close contact with the ‘reality’ and ‘actual experience of language,’ namely the documentation and fieldwork carried out on previously undescribed languages or dialects. Wenker, Wrede, Winteler, Guilléron, Jaberg, Kloeke, Schuchart, Schmeller, Gamillscheg, Ellis, Kurath, Sapir, Whorf, Firth, Pike, McDavid, Longacre, Chafe, Grimes…some linguists indeed! (de Beaugrande, 2001)

Here, again, irony, or rather sarcasm, comes into the play as well. More often, however, this scheme is realized by an explicitly stated topos from the person, sometimes combined with topoi from the authority and contrast: (51) I have studied and applied the trends he discusses, and I confess myself unable to recognise them in Widdowson’s portrayals, least of all in the ‘assumptions’ and ‘claims’ and he consigns to them (shown below in data samples 37–41 and 42–45). (de Beaugrande, 2001) (52) I would also reject Widdowson’s vision of ‘Halliday sharing the assumption’ that ‘textual meaning is a sum of the parts rather than a set of mutually modifying relations’ (16f). Halliday says quite the reverse: (de Beaugrande, 2001) (53) Further, I would contest the Widdowsonian repudiation of Halliday’s (1985, p. xv, xxii) ‘aim’ to ‘construct a grammar for the purposes of text analysis’ and to provide ‘at once both a grammar of the system and a grammar of the text’ (17): (de Beaugrande, 2001)

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Moreover, the verbs used above clearly belong to the semantic field of ‘refutations.’ In certain cases, refutations of false premises may concern the analysis: (54) Fairclough’s main and compelling point is that […]. All this is illuminatingly exemplified. But I think he too quickly equates such speaker bias with addressee bias when he asserts that [...]. Much of what he has to say concerns […]; curiously, he does not mention the fact that the accused Libyans’ personal perspective is nowhere represented. But the framing and subtle management he alleges is simply not, to my mind, sufficiently demonstrated. For example, he comments on [...]. (Toolan, 1997, p. 91)

Here, Toolan combines topoi from the person and exemplification, criticizing the manner of analysis, which is done under false premises. The following example sounds even stronger, employing also a topos from the contrast and a question-raising argumentation scheme plus audience involvement: (55) The difficulty is that it is hard to see how such an analysis can ever be systematically undertaken. For if all language is so loaded, so ‘ideologically saturated’, then there is no redundancy – every feature of the text carries its ideological charge, and this will interact with others in all manner of ways. So how do we know under what textual or contextual conditions one feature takes on particular saliency and overrides the others? How do we know when a particular ‘transformation’, or a particular word or collocation (simply, killer not, behind bars) has such a covert ideological force that it overrides other linguistic features and is indeed the key to textual significance? (Widdowson, 1998, p. 146)

Hunston (2005, p. 6), who investigates a very similar corpus of articles using, however, a corpus investigation software, treats cases like the one above as creating both conflict with the criticized author and consensus with the readers: “In a single phrase, Widdowson positions his readers in alliance with himself and against de Beaugrande.” The Conclusion Does Not Follow the Premises; the Conclusion Is False Although Walton et  al. (2008) distinguish between the two types of schemes, I personally found it difficult to apply this differentiation to the particular analysis of the data, and I have therefore included them in one group. This is actually the most frequent critical argumentation scheme

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used in the corpus—a fact that seems natural considering the kind of textual sequences under consideration here, namely, to refute the arguments/ claims of the opposing ‘camp’ by all means. The scheme refers most frequently to theory, definitions/terminology or analysis and is based on the topos from the contrast: (56) Rather than providing a sound explanation or a definition of ‘pretext’, Widdowson illustrates the relevance of this concept by pointing out how the focus of attention on meaning is regulated in different communicative events. (Hauser, 2006, p. 814) (57) He suggests that one way of proceeding would be to establish default interpretations of texts based on psycholinguistic research. However, there is little in the way of explanation or illustration of how Widdowson’s ideas of discourse analysis would be theoretically implemented and methodologically applied. (Hauser, 2006, p. 814)

The same review ends up with a definite refutal of the book as a whole: (58) In this sense, Widdowson’s book is to be seen as an important contribution to the critical study of language. However, Widdowson mainly focuses on what he identifies as the theoretical and methodological shortcomings of CDA and  offers little in terms of solutions to the mentioned problems. Therefore, I would not recommend the book to readers who are new to the field and are interested in an accessible introduction to Critical Discourse Analysis. (Hauser, 2006, p. 815)

In the following example, the reviewed author is straightforwardly accused of ignorance as the reason for drawing false conclusions: (59) These, Widdowson vows, are all ‘the computer can cope with’, since it ‘readily recognizes’ ‘formally marked criteria’ rather than ‘semantic subtleties’ (6f, 14);  he is obviously several generations behind on his knolwledge of software for automatic parsing and lemmatising. (de Beaugrande, 2001)

Here, the reviewer resorts to one of the most powerful means of refuting scientific claims, namely through declaring the author ignorant. Claiming false conclusions is often done from the ‘I’-perspective, i.e., by employing a topos from the person together with the already mentioned topos from the contrast:

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(60) It is not open to critical discourse analysts to reply that specifying how things might be more equitably cast, discoursally, is no necessary part of their agenda. I believe, on the contrary, that it has to be part of the agenda, if the following broad set of claims is being espoused. (Toolan, 1997, p. 89) (61) This interpretation fails to convince me, and becomes self-defeating. My objection is not to the idea of discoursal heterogeneity or of text-intemal ideological contradiction, only to the lack of their substantiation. The interpretive goals are plausible,  but reaching them requires a great deal more textual evidence and stylistic argumentation than is presented. (Toolan, 1997, p. 93)

As the discussion gradually becomes more heated, the two parties start accusing each other of ‘misinterpretation’: (62) His reply indicates that all I succeeded in doing was to misrepresent him. […] And by the same token, my own text is subject to misrepresentation. One example. I am charged with being too liberal in supposing that the ‘social’ is ‘a voluntary association of free individuals,’ that I disregard social conditions and see the pragmatic achievement of meaning as ‘simply a matter of circumstances or will of the individual, graced as a &dquo;natural&dquo; pragmatic process.’ I should be interested to know where there is textual warrant in my work for this bizzare interpretation of my position. You cannot study discourse in disregard of social factors and I do not know of anybody who claims you can. (Widdowson, 1996, p. 57)

Besides, the debate tends to develop into a highly controversial and very personal dispute; in the above example, Widdowson not only makes abundant use of the first-person singular but also involves a wider audience beside the readers (anybody / you). In some relatively rare cases, the argumentation scheme starts off from a topos from the authority, i.e., the authority is dismissed as unreliable: (63) Harris is, in many ways, a figure who casts a long shadow. A number of issues arise from his work on discourse analysis which have caused much of the confusion and contradiction I referred to earlier and still remain stubbornly problematic. Let me set them out, item by item. (Widdowson, 1995b)

Arguments with a Probative Function This is the case where theauthor employs the premises of the opponent in order to prove the conclusion(s) false. The scheme is not very frequent in

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the present corpus—authors obviously prefer to use their own premises/ arguments in order to provide contrast. The criticism may be aiming at the definition of terminology as in: (64) Fairclough first defines discourse ‘more narrowly than social scientists generally do’ as ‘language use’ or ‘parole’ or ‘performance’ (p 62). This is a well-established linguistic definition, of course. But on the next page he does define it as ‘social scientists generally do’ as ‘social practice’ without explanation, as if this were the same thing. The problematic relationship between the two traditions outlined in previous chapters is thereby resolved, it would seem not by argument, however, but by fiat. (Widdowson, 1995a, p. 511)

In the above, Widdowson points out some contradictions in his opponent’s use and definition of terminology, eventually accusing him of suggesting authoritative solutions without underpinning them in a convincing way. Perhaps the best example of probative argumentation schemes is de Beaugrande’s 2001 article that even has the subtitle: “The discourse of a recent position by H.G. Widdowson is analysed by the methods ‘criticised’ in that very paper.” In other words, the whole study is built upon the textual and, respectively, argumentative features of an opponent’s publication with the aim of proving him wrong: (65) With  no evident sense of irony, he oversteps the boundaries of his discipline  to castigate another discipline for overstepping its boundaries  – just when, as I noted, the journal’s editors are welcoming a ‘broad range of research paradigms’. Moreover, he briefs several leading figures in linguistics to the effect that their research would be ‘potentially ‘highly serviceable’ and ‘of considerable significance’ only if they acknowledge their ‘limitations’ and disavow their ‘mistakes’ (8, 23f). I have studied and applied the trends he discusses, and  I confess myself unable to recognise them in Widdowson’s portrayals, least of all in the ‘assumptions’ and ‘claims’ and he consigns to them (shown below in data samples 37–41 and 42–45). (de Beaugrande, 2001)

De Beaugrande’s perspective is personal (first person singular) but the argumentation is based exclusively on the opponent’s own text. In some instances, de Beaugrande becomes pretty sarcastic, not to say aggressive: (66) A key-word in the case against all three trends, and also against linguistics as a whole,  turns out to be ‘reality’. This potentially abstruse term

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becomes vital once ‘applied linguistics’ is defined to be intimately concerned with ‘reality’ and the ‘real world’ (samples 1, 2, 6, 8–9). [examples from the text under consideration] By this argument, linguistics can grasp ‘reality’ only in ‘restricted’ and ‘partial’ ways just because it is linguistics,  full stop. The prospect of surmounting such limits by joining an interdisciplinary research programme (e.g., as expounded in Beaugrande, 1997a) is not raised for a moment. As evidence for the key role of ‘reality’, I would cite its 31 occurrences in Widdowson’s paper, plus those of ‘real’ (20), ‘really’ (6), and ‘realize/realization’ (always in the sense of ‘make real, put to use, perform’) (13). The same stem is thus attested a remarkable 70 times, like an ominous ostinato. If ‘the term “real” indeed is often used freely as a general stamp of commendations’ (5), then Widdowson plainly follows suit. (Ibid.)

As the discussion gradually turns into a ‘war,’ de Beaugrande (2004) continues using probative argumentation schemes which, however, as the example below shows, already border on what I have called here ‘personal attack’: (67) These are the sorts of discursive issues that CDA seeks to bring to light and confront without our own “counter-discourse”, and therefore sees slight value, if not  actual handicap, in the sort of  academic window dressing Widdowson’s rebukes us for lacking.  He recognises this objection, but  patronisingly enlightens all us ignoramuses that “academics engage in intellectual enquiry and do research”, whereas “the promotion of the critical cause by persuasive appeal at the expense of academic rigour” “does the cause a serious disservice” (173).

Personal Attack With the latter example as a starting point, in what is to follow, I shall try to justify my decision to add an argumentation scheme to those enumerated by Walton et al. (2008) through examples that hardly demonstrate logical argumentation but are rather critical statements directed to the opponent as a person and a scholar, or as Hunston (2005, p.  1) notes, “the writers of such articles often attack individuals rather than outcomes of research.”. This argumentation scheme is most typical of the publications of H. G. Widdowson and R. de Beaugrande and is practically missing from the more general overview articles. This fact could be treated as authors’ idiosyncrasy, but it also demonstrates who the most committed representatives of the respective parties are. De Beaugande’s 2004 review starts off with the following metaphor:

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(68) Imagine if you will a most peculiar game of bowling. One contestant is the sole bowler; the others are all human bowling pins. And instead of an array of pins in the centre of the “alley”, just one human pin at a time is set up in the “gutter” where the bowler cannot fail to knock it down. And so he does, on and on, with evident relish in his underpinned mastery. Such a game seems to me a not altogether unfitting metaphor for H.G.  Widdowson’s (2004) latest and largest  – and, one ardently hopes, last  – assault on “(Critical) Discourse Analysis”. Some of the targets are familiar from his “past ten years” (page x) of fulminations, […]; and he frankly calls the new book “confrontational and uncompromising” (“waspish” would have been my word).

Another scathing metaphor comes later in the same text: (69) But Widdowson’s book shies away from data bearing on these large social issues, despite the bold avowal in [10]—like nailing one’s colours to the mast of the ship and then disembarking before it sails. So his book turns out as his own rather miscellaneous and rambling “critical analysis” (or more precisely “meta-analysis”) of particular flaws in very different (C)DA projects and methods, like a laundry-list of clothes hung up on a public clothesline according to how each individual item seems torn or stained.

H. G. Widdowson, on his part, states directly that there are disagreements between himself and N. Fairclough and that those disagreements are more of a personal than professional character: (70) Norman Fairclough and I disagree about a lot of things. That much is obvious. (Widdowson, 1996, p. 57)

And further: (71) My position, then, is that different discourses in the Foucault sense, as ideological and idealised social constructs can only be activated through discourse in my sense: through the pragmatics of individual interaction. So it is that this present exchange between Norman Fairclough and myself is not between political values or ideological positions, Marxist versus Liberal or whatever, but between him and me, his views, sensitivities, prejudices, and mine. These are, of course, formed in part by our social history and political allegiances, expressive to some degree of the different discourse communities we belong to, but essentially this discourse we are pragmatically engaged in is a personal matter. (Widdowson, 1996, p. 59)

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In reply to that Fairclough (1996, p. 53) exclaims: (72) However, this still leaves an apparently major difference between CDA and Widdowson with respect to politics: Widdowson has no overt political commitments. But the fact that political commitments are not overt does not of course mean that they do not exist!

In the same issue of Language and Literature, Widdowson (1996, p. 69) seems to make a peace proposal by finishing his article with the words: (73) And him against me? I think the discourse we are here enacting is a matter of individuals arguing against each other. We take up different ­positions, and these are of course to some degree discursively informed, expressive of different modes of thought, political beliefs, social values. And so if we feel frustrated and affronted, we might be tempted to reduce each other to ‘social subjects discursively determined and constructed’ and I cry ‘Marxist!’ and he cries ‘Liberal’ and we resentfully go our separate ways. Bu that would be a pity. Our positions are not as polarised as all that. I am no apologist for ‘greater linguistics’ and totally reject the intertextual implication of the term. I agree that we need to take an interdisciplinary perspective on language study. I agree that people should be alerted to language abuse, and made aware of the ways in which it can be used to persuasive and manipulative effect. You do not have to subscribe to CDA to believe these things, and you do not have to be a critical linguist to have a social conscience. So I think there is a good deal of common ground between Norman Fairclough and myself, which both of us ought to be willing to explore.

Unfortunately, the war does not come to an end. With the publication of his 2004 book, where CDA is again in the focus of criticism, Widdowson provokes the above-quoted viciously aggressive review by de Beaugrande (2004). Others follow suit and join the dispute in favour of Widdowson’s viewpoint: (74) Widdowson has been a persistent critic of CDA in recent years, directing most of his fire at Fairclough’s work, and apparently irritating some of those who subscribe to, or sympathize with, the CDA project. To Beaugrande (online) Widdowson is a bowler setting up human pins in the gutter where he ‘cannot fail’ to knock them down. According to Wodak (2006, p. 606), ‘criticism of CDA seems to be on the top of Widdowson’s agenda and has been for years’. She also accuses Widdowson of being ‘patronizing’, and

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alludes to his ‘lack of expertise’ on CDA (p. 607). Exasperation and name-­ calling, however, do not of themselves invalidate Widdowson’s arguments. (Poole, 2010, p. 147)

Poole himself (2010, p. 146) criticizes Fairclough directly, although in a rather ‘impressionistic’ way: (75) Fairclough’s work, one gains the strong impression that it is actually his self-declared socialism  – and the associated hostility to imperialism, neo-­ liberalism, and global capitalism  – rather than ‘close linguistic analysis’ which is the wellspring.

As the examples above demonstrate, the argumentation schemes based on ‘personal attack’ often go beyond the means of argumentation and especially linguistic expression commonly accepted by scholarly discourse communities as belonging to the ethics of scientific communication. Other Argumentation Schemes Under this heading, I would like to present some argumentation schemes found in the corpus that, first, can hardly be classified in any of the groups discussed above and, second, are very rare in written academic discourse anyway. The first extraordinary case is the concluding paragraph of Widdowson’s (1995b, p. 171) article: (76) You have (dear reader) been busy interpreting the text of this article, deriving from it  your own discourses, authenticating it in  your own terms, referring it to your reality. And naturally the discourse of your interpretation may not match the discourse of  my intention. There is not much I can do about that: imperfect communication is a pragmatic fact of life.  All I can hope is that in your piercing out my imperfections with your thoughts, we have arrived at some shared understanding, some mutual accommodation and convergence of worlds.

Here, Widdowson initiates a dialogue with the reader addressing them directly (‘you’ perspective) from the ‘I’ perspective and finalizes the dialogue by assuming the reader’s involvement and conformity with the suggested arguments (‘we’ perspective). The use of direct address may occur in spoken academic discourse where the speaker has immediate contact with the audience but is practically missing from the written mode of

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academic discourse (see, i.e., Vassileva, 2006, among others). It is true that there is a note at the end of the article pointing out that: “This article is a slightly modified version of a paper given at a seminar jointly organised by the British Council and the University of Lancaster, August 1994”. Still, the very decision of the author to keep those finishing thoughts in the published version as well can hardly be incidental. The highly personalized and (intended as) interactive paragraph is evidence for Widdowson’s desire to attract more followers of his position by simultaneously playing down his own claims and giving his readers more freedom of interpretation. Another example of an argumentation scheme that is hardly to be expected in a review article is (again!) Widdowson’s (1998, p. 150) contemplations on the ethics of “intellectual enquiry.” which serve as a conclusion (for reasons of space, I have shortened the two paragraphs): (77) And here we come up against a general and very tricky problem about the accountability of intellectual enquiry. One can accept it as a matter of fundamental principle that scholarship should be turned to social account and engage with moral issues, but the question is how far this can or should be done without compromising the very principles of scholarship which provide the authority for this engagement. […] My view would be that if a cause is just then we should look for ways of supporting it by coherent argument and well-founded (as distinct from well-funded) analysis. And I would indeed argue that to do otherwise is to do a disservice to the cause. [Criticism of the CDA approach]. And here, I think, is the central problem with CDA, and the reason why it is so influential while being so obviously defective. It carries conviction because it espouses just causes, and this is disarming, of course it conditions the reader into acceptance. If you can persuade people by an appeal to moral conscience, you do not need good arguments. But such persuasion deflects attention from questions of validity. It thus inhibits intellectual enquiry and ultimately undermines its integrity in the interests of expediency. […] In this respect what is distinctive about Critical Discourse Analysis is that it is resolutely uncritical of its own discursive practices.

Actually, with the above words, Widdowson accuses the CDA practitioners of some of the worst possible ‘sins’ in academic endeavours from the points of view of scientific ethics  – namely of “compromising the very principles of scholarship,” and of being manipulative both with the data they base their investigations on and with the conclusions they draw from

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these data, thus manipulating the audience as well. Such allegations, besides being very strong, eventually dismiss as worthless, untrustworthy, and futile the whole theory and practice of CDA, respectively, the work of all its adherents. This and similar statements in the (Widdowson) 2004 book provoked de Beaugrade (2004) to react ferociously: (78) The Preface demurely trivialises his verbal sallies of aggression, which he prefers to call “reservations” and the like: “no offence is intended, and I hope to be forgiven if any is taken” (ix). Yet much of it is hard for me to see as inoffensive; and the colleagues he attacks and I have corresponded with did not sound exactly forgiving. Here is what just one of them e-mailed me after reading a draft of this piece: […] (John Sinclair) And that’s not all he wrote. Some responses from other prominent victims were, erm, considerably less adaptable to public citation.

In the same very emotional review, de Beaugrande resorts to another argumentation scheme that is quite unusual for academic writing—he tells a story about his personal communication/relationships with the main participants involved in the debates under consideration here: (79) Evidently without affecting him, I have deconstructed his criticisms of Halliday, Sinclair, and Fairclough and their three respective fields of inquiry (Beaugrande 1998a, 2001). Curiously, I am (or was) a friend (and sometime boozing buddy) of all four gentlemen, though of course never at the same time and place; in a relaxed environment, they are genial chappies you wouldn’t imagine in combat. For myself, I could see the point and viewpoint of each one; I didn’t see any reason why they shouldn’t go their separate ways in peace. Besides, I am a practised and long-term synthesizer of work by broad fields and researchers (e.g., Beaugrande 1980, 1984), some of whom were not even on speaking terms with each other nor allowed any merit to each other’s approaches.

Such reminiscences add a personal touch to the argumentation and position the author as a mediator between opposing parties—a mediator who is tolerant and “determined to judge for myself on each one’s own merits” (ibid.). However, as he goes on to say, “The razor of my own polemics were aimed precisely at those who revelled in unfair or over-the-­ top polemics” (ibid.), and this justifies his attack on Widdowson:

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(80) So I was, so to speak, automatically activated by Widdowson’s (2004) polemics against Halliday, Sinclair, and Fairclough, and undertook to show, via “discourse analysis” of “a mini-corpus”  Widdowson’s diatribes, using actual quotes from all three scholars, that  he was manifestly uninformed, misguided, or unfair. (Ibid.)

The “boozing buddy” language transforms drastically into a razor-­ sharp choice of vocabulary that forebodes (being at the beginning of the article) the demolishing criticism that is to follow. Such sudden changes of perspective and style in general are most probably intended, among other purposes, to grab the reader’s attention and guide him/her through the process of argumentation.

5.8   Concluding Remarks To summarize the most important observations from this part of the study, I should point out to the following characteristic features of the ‘academic war’ under investigation: 1. The premises criticism is based on are of predominantly content-­ oriented, theoretical character, or are concerned with the validity of the analysis. Obviously, form-oriented premises are of little or no interest to the authors, the language/style is not discussed at all in contrast to academic book reviews. One of the reasons for the latter is most probably the fact that all scholars investigated here are outstanding writers in the field. However, the focus on content is primarily directed by the aim of the publications, namely, to refute crucial theoretical claims put forward by the opponent(s). 2. The language is highly personalized, I dare claim, more than in any other academic genre, where (especially some of) the authors resort not only to the first-person singular, thus expressing their own opinion, but also constantly try to involve the audience in the process of argumentation through extensive use of the inclusive ‘we’ and, even more untypical of the written mode of presentation—the direct address (‘you’). Switching between pronouns and thus engaging the readers in a dialogue is another distinctive feature that sometimes reminds one of the styles of conference presentations and discussion sessions. 3. Considering the confrontative nature of the exchange, it was expected that the topos from the contrast will demonstrate high

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frequency, but the seldom employment of other topoi based on everyday-logic generic premises reveals once again the extremely high level of personalization of the debate. 4. Relatively unexpected was the rare employment of the topos from the authority since this is considered to be one of the most convincing argumentation strategies in academic communication. The only plausible explanation I could offer here is that the authors under consideration are, or at least regard themselves, as ‘authorities’ and therefore do not find it necessary to resort to other specialists in the field in order to support their claims. Of course, one should not forget that we are ­dealing here with some of the founders of the two opposing schools, who defend theoretical and methodological approaches they have conceived themselves. 5. Turning now to the argumentation schemes analyzed in the study, the fact that the refutations dominate overwhelmingly is not surprising at all, considering the goals and nature of the discourse. Interesting to note is the abundant use of questions/‘questioning the premises and/or the conclusions.’ This is another feature of discourse that is more typical of the spoken mode of academic communication. Besides, unlike in other genres, the questions are very seldom rhetorical, but rather of the kind that really expect answers. Semantically, however, they express criticism, and the presupposition is usually that there are no answers but only false claims. In this connection, the debate again comes close to a spoken exchange of opinions and arguments—an exchange that is further realized through subsequent publications. Therefore, intertextuality plays an ever-increasing role with the development of the debate over time. I shall not dwell on this issue here in more detail, however, since the role of intertextuality will be more thoroughly discussed in the Conclusion (Chap. 6). 6. Another distinctive feature of the means of argumentation observed in the corpus is the employment of a number of metaphors and irony that, as many of the examples above demonstrate, often go beyond the generally accepted ethics in the academia in their interpersonal pragmatic effect. 7. And last but not least, the authors under examination make use of other argumentation schemes such as personal attacks, direct interaction with the reader, ‘preaching’ ethics of intellectual enquiry, story-­telling elements, etc., all of them being quite far from logical argumentation proper which is actually expected in academic publi-

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cations. This is another fact in support of the assumption that the discourse of an ‘academic war’ has some specific characteristic features that make it stand out among the standard genres in the academia and therefore deserves particular attention. Therefore, genre theory should be extended to also embrace such ‘deviations’ from the widely accepted norm and explain their structure, language used, and function in the community. I would like to finish this discussion with another quotation from the corpus, whose final sentence (bolded) summarizes best all the above-said: The book ends with the already noted patronising admonition scolding us “academics” to “conform to the conventions of rationality, logical consistency, empirical substantiation, and so on that define authority” (173)—of which the book itself hardly seems to shine as an epochal demonstration. We are despondently left in limbo with the echoes of the wholly unintentional irony in an earlier dismissal of Wodak and her study group (Titscher, Meyer, Wodak, and Vetter 2000): [19] There seems little point in providing such a complex theoretical and procedural apparatus without demonstrating how it actually works. (144) Res ipsa loquitur. (de Beaugrande 2004)

References Hauser, Stefan (2006). Book Review: Text, Context, Pretext: Critical Issues in Discourse Analysis. Discourse & Society 17, 813–815. Hunston, S. (2005). Conflict and consensus: Construing opposition in applied linguistics. In E. Tognini-Bonelli & G. del Lungo Camiciotti (Eds.), Strategies in academic discourse (pp. 1–15). John Benjamins. Perelman, C., & Olbrechts-Tyteca, L. (1969). The new rhetoric. A treatise in argumentation. University of Notre Dame Press. Toulmin, S. (1958). The uses of argument. Cambridge University Press. Vassileva, I. (2000). Who is the author? (A contrastive analysis of authorial presence in English, German, French, Russian and Bulgarian academic discourse). Sankt Augustin: Asgard Verlag. Vassileva, I. (2006). Author-Audience Interaction. A Cross-Cultural Perspective. Sankt Augustin: Asgard Verlag. Walton, D. (1996). Argumentation schemes for presumptive reasoning. Erlbaum. Walton, D. (2010). Why fallacies appear to be better arguments than they are. Informal Logic, 30, 159–184. Walton, D., Reed, C., & Macagno, F. (2008). Argumentation Schemes. Cambridge University Press. Widdowson, Henry (2004). Text, Context, Pretext: Critical Issues in Discourse Analysis. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

CHAPTER 6

Confrontation and the Academic Discourse Community Revisited

Abstract  This chapter servers as a conclusion and sums up the results of the study, at the same time bringing up some theoretical issues and putting them in new light in view of the obtained results. It is concluded that in the humanities it is easier to play down the discourse of other scholars. Especially in cases where there is a preliminary conception that there could not possibly be any common ground to be found, where the review writers sees themselves as wаrriоrs, as gatekeepers whose mission is to fight for the only cause, their own cause, the discussion of a book may turn into a battlefield and remain a battlefield, only to take other forms, sometimes through other media of academic communication. Thus, one could hardly speak today of the academic discourse community as one consisting of like-minded peers. Like-mindedness consists in “moving within the same semiotic space,” in partial sharing of terminology and background knowledge, in observing certain politeness rules. It stops, however, there, where basic interests of various kinds clash, since the competition for power and prestige in science becomes ever more intensive with the increase of its importance in modern society. Keywords  Academic discourse community • Cultural differences • Linguistic means • Methodological approach • Pedagogical implications

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 I. Vassileva, Confrontation in Academic Communication, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-32736-0_6

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The contrastive analysis of the academic book reviews in English and German demonstrated that there exist cultural differences between the two discourse communities in view of the investigated phenomenon. The German community seems to be more tolerant, more unified, and the individual authors show fewer idiosyncratic features. This is due to the fact that, first, the German academic community is much smaller, which means that its members are much more likely to know each other and maintain various kinds of professional and/or personal relationships than the English-speaking community. Besides, it follows a long-standing tradition of academic communication patterns, ethics, etc., down to the linguistic means for the expression of criticism. The results of the study do not, therefore, confirm Galtung’s (1985) assumption that the Teutonic academic community is much more severe and intolerant than the Saxon one. In the English-speaking community, on the other hand, one observes a much higher degree of idiosyncrasy, a lower degree of unification, a strong tendency toward usage of ‘personal attacks,’ where the latter is also confirmed by the discussion in Chap. 5. Both the contrastive (Chap. 4) and the longitudinal study (Chap. 5) demonstrate domination of epistemic argumentation, which is only natural for academic discourse, but also a high degree of usage of deontic argumentation, of personalization and thus of ethic argumentation. The latter types of argumentation make the genre of the academic book review stand out among most of the other genres in academic communication, with the exception of the other, occluded review genres. These, however, are not accessible to the general public/wider audience. Turning now to the two methodologies used in Chaps. 4 and 5, it seems that the inclusion of the discussion of argumentation schemes allows for many more interesting observations above the level of the Aristotelian topos by looking at larger organizational structures that assumingly reflect cognitive structures as well. From a theoretical perspective, the argumentative schemes approach employed in this research proved useful for a longitudinal study including the examination of publications related to one another intertextually, whereas other approaches, as mentioned above, remain at the level of the individual argumentative token and its rhetorical/linguistic analysis. Nevertheless, a critical issue of this approach turned out to be the highly inferential character of the identification and categorization of the CASs and, consequently, the operationalization of the model. The problem could be resolved by using multiple judges in

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order to ensure inter-coder reliability. Still, the refinement and/or the employment of a different solution may present a fruitful subject for future research. Other directions for further investigations would be the establishment of confrontative rhetoric and its realization in related, as well as totally different field of research, in an effort to determine similarities and differences and characteristic features of the genre. Besides, contrastive studies between different languages may be expected to bring to light cross-cultural variations in view of the examined phenomena. In terms of pedagogical implications, the results of the study may be used in EAP and ESP/LSP courses at a more advanced level to create awareness of the existence of confrontation in academia, foster critical thinking, and understanding of genre specificities. Contrastive studies, on their part, would be helpful to scholars—non-native speakers who wish to publish (primarily) in English, especially such that come from almost totally non-confrontative academic backgrounds. Another point worth mentioning here is that according to Hyland (2005, p.  175) writers’ evaluative choices are restricted to a subset of linguistic means for expressing especially negative evaluation. The present study and more particularly the investigation of the language of the academic war contradicts this observation, since it shows that linguists employ a very large variety of linguistic means, some of them typically impermissible for academic discourse. Thus, explicit denials belong to what Martin (1992, p. 147) calls “dismissal genre” that “involves recasting another’s work in one’s own terms […] and then rendering it absurd with respect to one’s own ‘in-house’ criteria.” Besides, in the humanities, it is even easier to play down the discourse of other scholars. Especially in cases where there is a preliminary conception that there could not possibly be any common ground to be found, where the review writer sees him/herself as a wаrriоr, as a gatekeeper whose mission is to fight for the only cause, their own cause, the discussion of a book may turn into a battlefield and remain a battlefield, only to take other forms, sometimes through other media of academic communication. Thus, one could, to my mind at least, hardly speak today of the academic discourse community as one consisting of likeminded peers. Like-mindedness consists in ‘moving within the same semiotic space,’ so to say, in partial sharing of terminology and background knowledge, in observing certain politeness rules. It stops, however, there, where basic

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interests of various kinds clash, since the competition for power and prestige in science becomes ever more intensive with the increase of its importance in modern society. To conclude with, I should say that when I started collecting the corpus, I expected to come across constructive vicious criticism, especially considering Hyland’s (2004, p.  45) remark that: “Vicious criticism can seriously undermine an author’s credibility and lavish praise can be unwelcome as superficial and undiscriminating. An evaluation thus bears interpersonal implications for both its author and the wider community.” However, what I found, especially in English, were real battles for a place under the sun—not through search for ‘free places’ but through elbowing others out. Our current conventions of climbing the academic ladder and making a name in the community through opposition and refutation of the work of our predecessors could be extremely counterproductive in the achievement of our primary goal, namely the maintenance of the purity of science and its principal aim—to explore the enormous complexity of our world.

References Galtung, J. (1985). Struktur, Kultur und intellektueller Stil. Ein vergleichender Essay über sachsonische, teutonische, gallische und nipponische Wissenschaft. In A.  Wierlacher (Ed.), Das Fremde und das Eigene (pp.  151–193). Judicum-Verlag. Hyland, K. (2004). Disciplinary discourses, Michigan classics ed.: Social interactions in academic writing. University of Michigan Press. Hyland, K. (2005). Stance and engagement: A model of interaction in academic discourse. Discourse Studies, 7(2), 173–192. SAGE Publications. Martin, J. R. (1992). Theme, method of development and existentiality: The price of reply. Occasional Papers in Systemic Linguistics, 6, 147–183.



Appendix

Source Texts Chapter 4: The Academic Book Review German Reviews Schäfer, S. (2003). Adamcova, L. (1997). Phonetik der deutschen Sprache. Bratislava: Iniverzita Komenskeho. Zeitschrift für Angewandte Linguistik 38, 105–108. Beißwegner, M. (2001). Beck, H-R. (2001). Politische Rede als Interaktionsgefüge: Der Fall Hitler. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Zeitschrift für Angewandte Linguistik 35, 105–118. Chudoba, G. (2007). Mark Hancock (2004), Pronunciation Games. Cambridge University Press (für Deutschland: Stuttgart: Ernst Klett Verlag). Zeitschrift für Interkulturellen Fremdsprachenunterricht 12: 2. Retrieved from https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/267971056.pdf Ding, Y., Fluck, H-R. (2003). Köbler, G. (2002). Rechtschinesisch. Rechtswörterbuch für jedermann. München: C. H. Beck. Fachsprache/ International Journal of LSP 25, 60–62. Thurmair, M. (2000). Eckerth, J. (1998). Kognitive Aspekte sprachbe zogener Lernerfragen. Interaktion und Kognition im Deutsch-­ als-­ Fremdsprache-Unterricht. Hohengehren: Schneider Verlag. Zeitschrift für Angewandte Linguistik 33, 121–126. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 I. Vassileva, Confrontation in Academic Communication, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-32736-0

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Strohner, H. (2001). Jäckel, M. (1999). Medienwirkungen: Ein Studienbuch zur Einführung. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. Zeitschrift für Angewandte Linguistik 35, 119–120. Hohmann, S. (2003). Pawlowski, K., Riebensahm, H. (2000). Suggestion. Wie wir mit heimlichen Botschaften umgehen. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag. Zeitschrift für Angewandte Linguistik 39, 137–140. Lietz, Gero (2007). Bunk, Gerhard S.J. (2005), Phonetik aktuell. Kopiervorlagen mit 2 CDs. Ismaning: Hueber. ISBN 3-19-501690-7. Zeitschrift für Interkulturellen Fremdsprachenunterricht 12:1. Retrieved from https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/267971922.pdf Näf, A., Pfander, D. (2001). a with an elastic − Deutsches im Englisch von französischsprachigen Schülern. Zeitschrift für Angewandte Linguistik 35, 5–37. Spillner, Bernd (2007). Ilona Feld-Knapp (2005), Textsorten und Spracherwerb. Eine Untersuchung zur Relevanz textsortenspezifischer Merkmale für den ‘Deutsch als Fremdsprache’-Unterricht. Hamburg: Dr. Kovač (= Lingua, 2). ISBN 3-8300-1867-3. 214 Zeitschrift für Interkulturellen Fremdsprachenunterricht 12:1. Retrieved from https:// zif.tujournals.ulb.tudarmstadt.de/article/id/2554/. English Reviews (Also Used in Chap. 5: The ‘Academic War’—A Case Study) Blommaert, Jan & Chris Bulcaen (2000). Critical Discourse Analysis. Annual Review of Anthropology 29. 447–466. de Beaugrande, Robert (2001). Interpreting the Discourse of H. G. Widdowson: A Corpus-Based Critical Discourse Analysis. http:// www.beaugrande.com/WiddowsonianDiscourse.htm (Accessed 15 October 2010). de Beaugrande, Robert (2004). The Case against Critical Discourse Analysis Reopened: In Search of Widdowson’s “Pretexts.” http://www. beaugrande.com/WiddowsonPretexts.htm (Accessed October 2010). Fairclough, Norman (1992). Discourse and Social Change. London: Polity Press. Fairclough, Norman (1996). A reply to Henry Widdowson’s ‘Discourse analysis: a critical view’. Language and Literature 5 (1). 49–56. Hauser, Stefan (2006). Book Review: Text, Context, Pretext: Critical Issues in Discourse Analysis. Discourse & Society 17. 813–815.

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Poole, Brian (2010). Commitment and criticality: Fairclough’s Critical Discourse Analysis evaluated. International Journal of applied Linguistics, Vol. 20, No. 2. 137–155. Tian, Hailong (2004). H.G. Widdowson. Text, Context, Pretext: Critical Issues in Discourse Analysis. (Review) Language in Society 35. Toolan, Michael (1997). What is critical discourse analysis and why are people saying such terrible things about it? Language and Literature 6 (2). 83–103. Widdowson, Henry (1995a). Norman Fairclough. Discourse and Social Change. Polity Press, 1992 (Review). Applied Linguistics, Vol. 16, No 4. 510–516. Widdowson, Henry (1995b). Discourse analysis: a critical view. In: Language and Literature 4 (3). 157–172. Widdowson, Henry (1996). Reply to Fairclough: Discourse and interpretation: conjectures and refutations. Language and Literature 5 (1). 57–69. Widdowson, Henry (1998). The Theory and practice of Critical Discourse Analysis. Applied Linguistics, Vol. 19, No 1. 136–151. Widdowson, Henry (2004). Text, Context, Pretext: Critical Issues in Discourse Analysis. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Index

A Academic, 2–5, 8, 11, 12, 16–28, 34–67, 72–75, 78, 86, 89, 96, 100–104, 106–108 Academic discourse, 3, 5, 8, 22, 23, 27, 43, 65, 66, 88, 99, 100, 106–108 Academic war, 5, 11, 13, 20, 37, 72, 107 Argumentation scheme, 5, 8, 12, 73, 74, 78, 80–103, 106 Argumentation strategies, 4, 5, 8, 53, 72, 103 B Book review, 5, 11, 12, 16, 23, 28, 34–67, 72, 77, 78, 102, 106

C Community of practice, 5, 23–28 Contrastive analysis, 10, 106 Contrastive discourse analysis, 5 Contrastive rhetoric, 5, 9–10, 25 Conventionalized conclusions, 55, 59, 66 Corpus-based methods, 5, 10–12 Critical argumentation, 20, 74, 78 Cross-cultural variations, 5, 58, 107 Culture, 2, 5, 10, 23–28, 40, 41, 43, 44, 67 D Deontic argumentation, 65, 106 E Expression of criticism, 4, 12, 23, 56, 77, 106

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 I. Vassileva, Confrontation in Academic Communication, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-32736-0

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F False premises, 83, 84, 91–92 G Generic premises, 54–56, 59, 61, 66, 103 Genre analysis, 9, 10 H Hedging, 2, 23, 34, 87, 88 I Intercultural communication, 23, 24 Intertextuality, 5, 8, 43–45, 103 N Negative evaluation, 5, 11, 12, 17–23, 107

P Personal attack, 60, 66, 85, 96–99, 103, 106 Probative function, 75, 94–96 R Review genres, 35, 39, 106 Review writer, 53, 60, 66, 107 T Theory of argumentation, 5, 54, 73 Topos based on means and goal, 62, 63 Topos from the authority, 56, 58, 61, 83, 91, 94, 103 Topos from the contrast, 64, 82, 88, 90, 92, 93, 102 Topos from the division, 64, 65 Topos from the example, 61, 62 Topos from the person, 56, 58, 60, 79–82, 87, 88, 90, 91, 93