Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 232 ( 2016 ) Betül Bal-Gezegin a, *

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1 Available online at ScienceDirect Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 232 ( 2016 ) International Conference on Teaching and Learning English as an Additional Language, GlobELT 2016, April 2016, Antalya, Turkey A Corpus-based Investigation of Metadiscourse in Academic Book Reviews Betül Bal-Gezegin a, * a Amasya University, Amasya 05100, Turkey Abstract Academic book reviews published in academic journals are expected to provide readers with both positive and negative evaluation of the book under review. This academic genre has recently been the focus of increasing number of studies due to its evaluative and interactional nature. The present cross-cultural study aimed to explore how interpersonal metadiscourse was used in Turkish and English book reviews. The corpus used in this study consisted of 150 published book reviews from different disciplines in English and Turkish. In order to understand how writers engaged in their reviews and interacted with their readers, Hyland s (2000) metadiscourse model was used to identify interpersonal markers in book reviews. With a focus of five common features from this model, hedges, emphatics (boosters), attitude markers, relational markers, and person markers were used as categories to be investigated. Relying on a quantitative data analysis followed by qualitative analysis, it was found that the total number of interpersonal metadiscourse features was considerably higher in the English corpus than in the Turkish corpus. Two languages showed variations particularly in the use of hedging devices which help writers to tone down their statements. Particularly learners in academic contexts can gain awareness of how various academic genres are realized in different cultures based on the findings. 2016The Authors. Published by by Elsevier Elsevier Ltd. Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license ( Peer-review under responsibility of the organizing committee of GlobELT Peer-review under responsibility of the organizing committee of GlobELT 2016 Keywords: Academic book reviews; interpersonal metadiscourse; hedges * Corresponding author. Tel.: ; fax: address:betul.bal@amasya.edu.tr The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license ( Peer-review under responsibility of the organizing committee of GlobELT 2016 doi: /j.sbspro

2 714 Betü l Bal-Gezegin / Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 232 ( 2016 ) Introduction English for Academic Purposes has a rising status in the field of language studies. There is now plethora of studies conducted on various types of academic genres. Being one of these genres, Academic review genres as labeled by Hyland and Diani, (2009, p.1), have been observed to attain a prominent status among others recently. Review articles, book blurbs, literature reviews, and review articles can be considered as sample types of the academic review genre. Being one of these review genres, the academic book review, also called book review article (hereafter BR), has been recently regarded as a noteworthy sub-genre of academic writing. BRs are believed to play a significant role in academic communication. Today, they are published in most academic journals in various disciplines and the number of journals publishing BRs is increasing. The purpose of reviewing a book is mainly to provide information on the structure of a book, its content, its intended audience, as well as negative and positive evaluation. As also highlighted by Hyland (2000), a BR is expected to provide not just information about the book but also an evaluation of features of a book. This evaluative nature of BRs has attracted attention of the scholars. How positive and negative evaluation is construed and the voices of authors have become the focus of related studies. Earlier studies on BRs include rhetorical patterns (e.g., Motta-Roth, 1995, 1998; De Carvalho, 2001; Moreno and Suárez, 2006, 2008; Nicolaisen, 2002), disciplinary variations (e.g., Diani, 2009; Tse and Hyland, 2009), pragmatics with a particular focus on praise and criticism (e.g., Lindholm-Romantschuk, 1998; Johnson, 1992; Belcher, 1995; Hyland, 2000; Gea Valor 2000; Giannoni, 2002; Hyland and Diani, 2009), and evaluation (Shaw, 2004). There are also cross-cultural analysis of BRs such as English and Italian (Giannoni, 2006), Portugese (De Carvalho, 2001), Spanish (Suárez ve Moreno, 2008) and French (Salager-Meyer, Alcaraz Ariza, and Pabón, 2007). Metadiscourse which is defined as the cover term for the self-reflective expressions used to negotiate interactional meanings in a text, assisting the writer (or speaker) to express a viewpoint and engage with readers as members of a particular community (Hyland, 2005, p.37), is yet another novel field of investigation in BRs. Studies with a focus of metadiscourse markers in BRs contribute to understanding how authors position themselves, how they convey their thoughts to the readers and how they interact with the readers in their reviews. These linguistic markers which help to see the presence of the author in a text are particularly significant in BRs since this genre requires personal evaluation of the book under review. According to Hyland (2005), metadiscourse can be divided into two broad categories as interactive (textual) and interactional (interpersonal). The former refers to features used to organize information so that the target reader should find it coherent and convincing. This group includes code glosses (e.g., in other words, specifically), endophoric markers ((in) (this) Chapter; see Section X), evidentials ((to) quote X, according to X), frame markers (in conclusion, on the whole), and transition markers (as a result, it follows that). The latter group refers to features that draw the reader into the discourse and give them an opportunity to contribute to it and respond to it by alerting them to the writer s perspective on propositional information and orientation and intention with respect to that reader (Hyland, 2005, p.52). There are five interactional metadiscourse categories in this group as shown below: Attitude markers indicate the writer s opinion or assessment of a proposition. Examples: I agree, I am amazed, appropriate, correctly, dramatic, hopefully, unfortunately Self-mention refers to explicit authorial presence in the text and gives information about his/her character and stance. Examples: I, we, the author Engagement markers explicitly address readers to draw them into the discourse. Examples: we, our (inclusive), imperative mood Hedges indicate the writer s decision to recognize other voices, viewpoints or possibilities and be (ostensibly) open to negotiation with the reader. Examples: apparently, assume, doubt, estimate, from my perspective, in most cases, in my opinion, probably, suggests Boosters allow the writer to anticipate and preclude alternative, conflicting arguments by expressing certainty instead of doubt. Examples: beyond doubt, clearly, definitely, we found, we proved, it is an established fact

3 Betü l Bal-Gezegin / Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 232 ( 2016 ) The interpersonal metadiscourse markers in academic texts have drawn much of scholars attention. Recent studies have discussed how the use of these markers affects the texts positively and make the text more efficient in regards to authorial presence. Particularly cross cultural studies of metadiscourse revealed significant cross linguistics and cross cultural differences in the use of these markers. The studies show that lingua-cultural context in which texts are composed can change the use of metadiscourse markers even within the same genre (e.g., Lafuente- Millán, 2014; Lee and Casal, 2014). As aforementioned, investigating metadiscourse markers has been done through several languages; however, there is not any study conducted on Turkish BRs. Therefore, this study aims to compare and contrast the metadiscourse markers in English and Turkish book reviews based on Hyland s model to investigate whether these markers function identically within the same genre. The study seeks to answer whether there are any significant differences between English and Turkish BRs in terms of the frequency of occurrences and types of metadiscourse markers. 2. Methodology 2.1. The corpus The specialized corpus collected for this study includes 150 book reviews published in academic journals in English and Turkish. An attempt was made to choose the BRs whose authors were native speakers of English and Turkish judged by the author's name and affiliation. The texts in the corpora are not translations of each other but they are all sample texts from the same genre of book reviews. The journals were among the most active and credited academic/scientific journals decided upon discussions with scholars from the target fields. The disciplines included are Educational Sciences (ES), History (HS), Law (LAW), Language (LN), Literature (LIT), Medical Sciences (MED), Philosophy (PH), Political Sciences (POL), Sociology (SOC), and Theology (THEO). The BRs collected were published in a twenty five-year time span ( ).The total numbers of words for English BRs corpora is 120,229 and 118,327 for Turkish. There is a parallel distribution of words according to the fields; however, it should be noted that BRs in the field of Medical Sciences have the least amount of words in both languages Metadiscourse model As aforementioned, metadiscourse markers have been classified in several taxonomies in the literature over the past several decades (Vande Kopple, 1985; Crismore, 1983; Hyland, 2005). The model proposed by Hyland (2005) has been used as the analytical model in this study. There are about 120 expressions identified as interpersonal metadiscourse markers in this taxonomy. For the purpose of this study 29 of these expressions were chosen as the target markers to be searched in Turkish and English BRs. These target markers were found as the most frequent markers by Junqueira and Cortes (2014) in their English BR corpus (see Table 2 below). Each of these markers in English was translated to Turkish for the purpose of the study. The translation was done by the researcher of the study who is a native speaker of Turkish. The translations were checked both in a dictionary and by another native speaker of Turkish to ensure that the equivalent expressions were reached. Table 1. Most Frequent interpersonal metalinguistics expressions in the corpus (adapted from Hyland, 2000 by Cortes, Junqueria) Attitude Markers Emphatics Interpersonal Markers Relational Markers Hedges even X actually I ( ) could/not important (ly) always we consider may interesting (ly) certainly me our (inclusive) often must clearly/it is clear that my perhaps in fact/the fact that/indeed our possible (ly) no/beyond that seems obviously sometimes/somewhat

4 716 Betü l Bal-Gezegin / Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 232 ( 2016 ) Procedure When the corpus collection procedure was finalized and the BRs were made ready to be analyzed, AntConc concordancing software (Anthony, 2011) was used to search the frequency of the words chosen from Hyland s list of Interpersonal Metadiscourse expressions in the corpus. As can be seen in the Table 2, the interpersonal metadiscourse markers and their equivalents in Turkish were searched in two sub-corpora one by one and the frequencies were reached. It should be noted that the retrieval procedure in Turkish corpus was not as straightforward as in English. Since Turkish is a pro-drop language, pronouns can be dropped and verb conjugates indicate the subject. Similarly, particular affixes added to nouns can indicate the possessive pronouns. For this reason, certain suffixes (e.g m, - z, - k) had to be searched in the Turkish corpus. Also since these affixes can occur as a part of the noun itself, manual analysis of each concordance was conducted. An example of such a case is with the suffix m which indicates possessive pronoun for first person singular (my life=hayat+ m). When Turkish BRs corpus was searched for words including this suffix, certain words such as kat l m (participation), k v lc m (spark) appeared. The word itself included m; however, it has nothing to do with the possessive suffix m. Due to such cases, an elaborate manual analysis was required for Turkish. Table 2. Interpersonal Metadiscourse Markers and thier Equivalents in Turkish Attitude Markers Emphatics Interpersonal markers even hatta/bile actually/in fact/ the fact that/ indeed asl nda, gerçekten, gerçekte, do rusu, oysa I, we, my, our ben, biz, (- m, im, um, üm)(- z, iz, uz, üz) (-ük, k, ik, uk) Relational Markers important(ly) önemli/önemli always hep, her zaman our bizim, (miz, müz, muz, m z) interesting(ly) ilginç, ilginç biçimde, ilginç ekilde must meli, mal, gerekmek- certainly kesinlikle, kesin, muhakkak, elbette, üphesiz clearly, it is clear aç kt r, aç kca, aç k olarak Hedges ( ) could (not), may -ebilmek perhaps, possibly belki, muhtemelen seems görün- sometimes/somewhat bazen, oldukça often genellikle, s k s k 3. Findings & Discussion The findings revealed that the total number of interpersonal metadiscourse markers was higher in the English corpus than in the Turkish corpus (n: 1,958 in English, n: 1,471 in Turkish). Turkish texts employed fewer metadiscourse markers than the English texts. Among five categories there were differences in the distribution of markers in English and Turkish. In English BRs hedges were the most frequent metadiscourse markers (n: 608, 31%). Interpersonal markers (n: 498, 25%). and attitude markers (n: 498, 24%) were the second most frequent metadiscourse markers. Emphatics (n: 256, 13%) and relational markers (n: 112, 6%) were the least frequent markers. Overall, there was a parallel distribution in English and Turkish. However, the most frequent metadiscourse marker in Turkish BRs corpus was not hedges but attitudinal markers (n: 465, 31%). It is no surprise that attitude markers were frequent in both languages. This may stem from the fact that reviewing a book requires personal evaluation of the reviewer. The reviewers need to tell their readers what they think of the book; therefore, attitude markers were relatively higher in both languages. Hedges as the second most common markers constituted the 27% of the total number. Another apparent difference between English and Turkish BRs was in the frequency of interpersonal markers. Interpersonal markers in Turkish corpus made 16% of the total markers whereas it was more commonly found in English BRs. Like English BRs, in Turkish BRs emphatics and relational markers were the least frequent markers. Here are some excerpts from the Turkish and English BRs with each type of markers.

5 Betü l Bal-Gezegin / Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 232 ( 2016 ) E.g 1. Kitab n ilginç yönü teknoloji ile hukukun kesi me noktalar n n yakalanm olmas d r. (birsenoglu_law_03_m) Attitude E.g 2. Professors Burk and Lemley's book is a must- read because of its provocative ideas. More importantly, their ideas provide a beacon of reason and intelligence in what has been a complex mess of patent reform. (gosh_law_10_m) Attitude E.g 3. Özellikle ilahiyat alan nda çal an ö renci ve akademisyenler ba ta olmak üzere eserin okunmas nda kesinlikle yarar oldu u ifade edilmelidir. (abat_theo_09_m) Emphatics E.g 4. He certainly does point us in interesting and potentially helpful directions (duvall_pol_01) Emphatics E.g 5. This fine book enhances our understanding of colonial nunneries. (arrom_hs_09) Interpersonal E.g 6. Biz, bu yaz m zla, eserin ana çizgilerini göstermeye, içinde savunulan görü leri belirtmeye ve bu konuda baz dü üncelerimizi aç klamaya çal aca z. (acemoglu_law_11) Interpersonal The finding that hedging markers were not as common in Turkish requires further investigation. As outlined in the guidelines for reviewing a book in academic journals, in reviews there should be both positive and negative evaluation. Hedging devices which are used to soften the voice of the reviewer can help to criticize the book in a more politely. This can create a more academic, interactive and face saving context in a review. Therefore, how Turkish authors soften their negative evaluations needs to be further investigated. Below are some excerpts showing how these devices help the author to show that he recognizes other viewpoints and he is open to other voices. This is a way to negotiate with the readers as can be see below. E.g 7 The author seems to be struggling in his own social position as being a part of a binary and privileged North American/ European "us" versus "them" throughout the book (see, for example, pages 3, 146, 184, 186). (charles_theo_14) Hedges E.g 8 Indeed, it could be argued that there is as much to learn from it today as there was thirty years ago. (coleman_phil_03) Hedges Sonuç Ve De erlendirme ( ) k sm nda, muhtemelen bu alanda yap lm ilk çal ma olmas sebebiyle yazar çok net sonuçlara yer vermemi tir. (ceylan_ph_12) Hedges 4. Conclusion The goal of the present study was to observe the use of hedging, emphatics and other forms of interpersonal metadiscourse in 150 BRs from Turkish and English. Metadiscourse is a significant aspect of book review writing since it creates effective interaction between reviewers and their audience. Interpersonal metadiscourse markers help the reviewers to express their attitudes towards the book they review, which is a required process of writing an effective book review. This study which is a part of an ongoing project on book reviews demonstrated that using interpersonal metadiscourse markers is a universal feature of writing a book review. Overall the distribution of metadiscourse markers was similar in both languages. However, the findings showed that the percentile proportion of total metadiscourse markers in English BRs was more than Turkish BRs. In addition, particularly some features such as hedging showed variety in different cultures and languages. In Turkish BRs hedging which helps the reviewers to soften their negative evaluation of the book seems to be not as common as it is in English BRs. This finding warrants further investigation because the study was limited to Turkish translation of hedging devices which were found to be the most frequent ones in English. Future studies can focus on other types of hedging devices in Turkish. In addition, there is a need for further research on how metadiscourse markers are used in various disciplines. A larger corpus of BRs in English and Turkish should be compiled to analyze disciplinary variations. To sum up, metadiscourse markers which enhance the quality of writing seem to be worth exploring through further research which might give us a better perspective on the role of metadiscourse in different genres in different cultures. The findings of this study can help to create awareness particularly for novice researchers who intend to publish book reviews in academic journals. The findings of this study and similar studies focused on BRs crossculturally and cross-linguistically can be beneficial for academic writing classes since they highlight the variation across languages in the use of metadiscourse markers.

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