Rhetorical Structure of English and Czech Academic Book Reviews

This study focuses on a contrastive analysis of linguistics book review articles written in English and Czech. The aim is two-fold: 1) to find out any variation in the rhetorical structure of these reviews; 2) to explore whether these structural differences somehow affect the way communicative goals of the genre of the book review article are achieved in the two language cultures. The theoretical framework of this study provides a modified version of Motta-Roth's (1995) taxonomy of rhetorical moves and their sub functions in book review articles. The results show that in spite of a number of similarities between the two writing traditions, certain variation occurs attributable to different rhetorical preferences of both cultures and varied cultural expectations of the genre.