Lexicogrammatical Variation in Academic Book Reviews

Abstract

This study is an attempt to systematically characterize Book Reviews (BRs) as an academic written genre in terms of the elements of the transitivity system with a view to exploring the effects of disciplinary variation on the lexico-grammatical features of this genre. A corpus of 90 academic BRs from discipline-related professional journals (physical science, social science and Humanity) was randomly selected and analysed by using the lexico-grammatical model of Halliday’s systemic functional linguistics. Significant differences were observed in terms of both the type and frequency of processes and participants. This, it seems, points to a difference in the semantic configuration of BRs peculiar to each discipline, although they all seem to fulfil a similar communicative purpose, evaluating knowledge production in the academic milieu. The observed features indicate that BRs in pure science journals, as compared to their counterparts in social science and humanities journals, appear to carry a higher percentage of passive construction, non-human concrete participants and the relational and existential processes, together with a lower percentage of specific human participants, hence, leading to texts heavily laden with grammatical metaphor and impersonality.