FOCUSED EVALUATION IN ACADEMIC BOOK REVIEWS: REALISATIONS AND FUNCTIONS

Abstract

Book reviews are highly evaluative academic genre as they essentially convey the assessment of the novel academic content within disciplinary communities. In terms of the (rhetorical) structure of the review, it has been observed that certain sections that contain fo- cused evaluation (i.e. evaluation of the specific aspects of the reviewed book that is generically called Move 3) might be central to the evaluative rhetorical purpose of the genre. Having in mind that the evaluation in book reviews in Serbian is scarcely researched, this paper explores the positions and functions of Move 3 in the academic book reviews published in the prestigious Serbian journal South Slavic Philologist. The principal aims are to provide qualitative accounts of Move 3 and introduce possibilities for the rhetorical implementation of this section as illus- trated in expert writing in Serbian. Motta-Roth’s (1996) four-move framework as well as Biber et al.’s (2007) steps from top down corpus analysis approach were used to determine the general rhetorical patternings of the reviews as well as the specific realisations of Move 3. The results show that, aside from being a part of the regular pattern (M1‒M2‒M3‒M4) that is widely rec- ognised in literature, Move 3 also interacts with Moves 1 and 2. Move 3 interacts with Move 1 so that it either merges with it or follows it. When it comes to the interactions with Move 2, Move 3 either precedes it or combines with it in information cycles.