Evaluation catalysts in German and Russian academic reviews in linguistics

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The concept of evaluation catalysts (EC), introduced by Sergey T. Nefedov to describe the evaluative acts of the author of an academic article/monograph, is applied in this article for the first time to the study of evaluation language in academic journal reviews. The aim of the article is to identify and describe the EC (connectors, prepositions, modal words and constructions, etc.) in accordance with the strategies of evaluative implication operated by German and Russian reviewers. To achieve this goal, we conducted a comprehensive comparative sociocommunicative and discourse-based (context-semantic, axiological, structural-grammatical, functional-pragmatic and communicative) analysis of 120 reviews published in 2016–2023 in German and Russian linguistic journals “Zeitschrift für Angewandte Linguistik”, “Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft”, “Zeitschrift für Rezensionen”, “Topics in the Study of Language”, “Problems of Onomastics”, “Russian Journal of Linguistics”. Based on the analysis results, three levels of EC have been identified: EC providing the realization of each strategy of evaluative implication; EC participating in the realization of macro-strategies of implicit evaluation; EC accompanying implicitly evaluative acts regardless of the specific strategy of evaluative implication. It is proved that EC differ depending on the strategies. The known classifications of implicit evaluation strategies are supplemented with new varieties of implicit evaluation mechanisms. The cases of using not only grammatical but also lexical units guiding the evaluative interpretation of the contexts of academic expert communication are established; asymmetry in the operation of EC is revealed, manifested both at the strategy level and also in interlingual and -cultural comparison.