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ON STRATEGIES OF IMPLICIT EXPERT EVALUATION IN GERMAN LINGUISTIC REVIEWS // Tomsk State Pedagogical University Bulletin. 2021. Issue 6 (218). P. 49-59

Introduction. The article focuses on the ways scientists express expert evaluation in German academic linguistic reviews. It contributes to the socio-communicative research on evaluation in academic communicative settings. Aim. The aim of the article is to reveal the most frequent strategies of implicit expert evaluation in German linguistic reviews. Material and methods. The materials of the study are 25 reviews published in 2016–2017 in field-specific academic journals: “Zeitschrift für Angewandte Linguistik”, “Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft” and “Zeitschrift für Rezensionen”. Qualitative (contextual semantic, functional pragmatic) and quantitative analysis of the German linguistic reviews provides a set of strategies used to covertly evaluate the papers reviewed. Results and discussion. We consider the expert evaluation as a specific communicative / discursive sub-type of linguistic evaluation marked by modifications of the general logical structure in terms of “subject – object – predicate of evaluation”. Adding the recipient of evaluation we obtain following structure: the subject and the recipient of expert evaluation are scientific discourse actors, the object is represented by formal and content-related aspects of the books reviewed and the predicate of expert evaluation are criteria of scientificity, norms, values and standards of communication shared by all members of the current scientific community. Our data analysis results support our hypothesis and demonstrate that it is possible to make an implicit evaluation of different polarity following the various implication strategies. Beside of well-known strategies used to express evaluation covertly in academic book reviews the article describes also new strategies, not yet mentioned in similar and related works: implicit evaluation through disagreement with the author’s viewpoint, implicit evaluation through recommendation to the review’s recipient and implicit evaluation through (in)direct question. Quantitative measures illustrate different frequencies of negative and positive implicit evaluation and lead to conclusion the explicit evaluation prevail among all types of evaluation whereas the negative implicit evaluation prevail among all tokens of implicit evaluation in our data.

Keywords: linguistic evaluation, implicit evaluation strategies, expert evaluation, academic linguistic review, academic communication