Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)

Academic discourse has traditionally been regarded as being informational, objective, and impersonal. Recent scholarship in the field of English for Academic Purpose (EAP), however, has questioned this view, shifting its focus to the interpersonal aspect of academic discourse (e.g., Charles, 2006; Gray & Biber, 2012; Hyland, 2005c). There is a growing awareness that knowledge is interpersonally negotiated and socially constructed. Motivated by a keen interest in the interpersonal dimension of scholarly writing, this study aims to examine how academics engage with readers in academic book reviews (BRs), the most evaluative academic genre with high interpersonal stakes. Appropriating and using the notion of discourse community as my theoretic framework, I argue that book reviewers are simultaneously members of a discipline-based discourse community and a gender-based speech community, both of which change over time. Consequently, writer-reader interaction is shaped by and constitutive of disciplinary and social settings characteristic of a particular historical time. Based on this assumed dialectical relation between text and context, I adopted the Engagement system of appraisal theory (Martin & White, 2005) as an analytic framework and examined a corpus of 240 BRs sampled from two disciplines, written by males and females, and published in two time periods. Both corpus-based quantitative analysis and in-depth textual analysis were conducted, with the latter aiming to flesh out the patterns yielded by the former. Also complementary to the corpus-based discourse analysis, interviews were conducted to collect book reviewers’ lived experiences and contextualized perceptions, so as to better understand the influence of discipline, gender, and time factors on the management of intersubjective positions in knowledge construction. This mixed-methods design has identified multiple disciplinary, gender-related, and time-based differences in using Engagement resources. These differences have been interpreted in terms of knowledge practices, epistemologies, knowledge-knower structures, genre conventions, discursive styles, social relations, and various historical trends. The findings of the present study can inform and help novice academics who hope to engage with their disciplinary colleagues effectively and acculturate themselves into appropriate ways of knowledge making and evaluation as shaped by disciplinarity, gender-based differences, and historical trends.