Original scientific paper
https://doi.org/10.31724/rihjj.51.1.4
“Why Don’t You…”: A Study of Linguistic Resources of Negative Politeness in English Research Article Reviews
Olga Boginskaya
orcid.org/0000-0002-9738-8122
; Irkutsk National Research Technical University
Abstract
The article presents the results of a corpus-based study of interpersonal relations between the reviewer and the author aiming to analyze negative politeness strategies and identify linguistic resources employed by the reviewers to avoid face-treatening acts in their peer review reports. Drawing on Brown and Levinson’s (1987) politeness theory and previous re- search on negative politeness strategies, the study identified five types of negative politeness strategies in the English-language corpus with suggesting and hedging as the most common ones. The results also show that the reviewers employ a variety of linguistic resources to mitigate the illocutionary force of critical comments, thus avoding imposing on the authors. They include impersonal constructions, questions, epistemic verbs, adverbials of degree and extent, modals, and personal pronouns among others. The study may shed some light on the ways of mitigating criticism and avoiding face-threatening acts in evaluative genres of academic discourse and provide further evidence of generic effects on language use in academic discourse.
Keywords
peer review; negative politeness; criticism; hedging; face
Hrčak ID:
335285
URI
Publication date:
30.12.2025.
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