A Contrastive Study of English and Chinese Book Reviews on Linguistics: Perspective of Attitudinal Meanings

The paper attempts to make a contrastive analysis of English and Chinese book reviews on linguistics in the light of the appraisal theory to discover the similarities and differences between English book reviews on linguistics (henceforth EBRLs) and Chinese book reviews on linguistics (henceforth CBRLs) with respect to the three attitude variables of affect, judgment and valuation. In both EBRLs and CBRLs, affect only takes up a very small part. Appreciation accounts for the great majority of attitude. Among all appreciation instances, positive valuations dominate positive appreciations, and negative compositions constitute the highest percentage of negative appreciations. In addition, EBRLs keep a higher percentage of reaction than CBRLs. Because reaction is more subjective than composition and valuation, it is concluded that English reviewers tend to take subjective ways more frequently than their Chinese counterparts to express their opinions. As for judgment, all the instances of judgment in the 40 book reviews are those of social esteem, especially of capacity. Chinese reviewers attend more to the author’s background, such as his history, reputation and previous publications, etc., than their western counterparts who attach more importance to the efforts the author has made to the book.