RHETORICAL STRUCTURE OF BOOK REVIEWS: A CROSS-LINGUISTIC AND CROSS-DISCIPLINARY STUDY

Book review genre is a pivotal part and parcel of academic discourse (Hyland, 2000). This is a part of academic discourse which has been overlooked until a decade ago and a lot of studies can be conducted to unveil the unknown aspects of this academic genre. This research reported in this paper explores a contrastive analysis of rhetorical structure of English and Persian book reviews taken from 10 online and printed journals. The study is done on 40 book reviews in both languages in the fields of literature and architecture. Four strata from each book review are included in this study are English literature, English architecture, Persian literature, and Persian architecture which are randomly assigned. These book reviews were analyzed by the scheme provided by Motta-Roth (1998) to see whether the same moves and stages are followed in the papers studied here. The findings led to the proposition of four new stages. The results of the study showed that in Persian book reviews, moves are mixed more frequently than in English ones while the latter were found to be stricter in following of the order of the moves. Other findings are also provided in the result section.