Authorial identity and textual voices in English review discourse across disciplines

Based on three small comparable corpora of book review articles from academic journals in the disciplines of linguistics, history and economics, this paper explores from a cross-disciplinary perspective to what extent and in which ways reviewers involved in the evaluation of academic research manifest themselves and their interaction with the various textual voices weaved into the text, with a particular focus on their manifestation and role in the construction of the reviewer’s evaluative discourse. A quantitative analysis of the corpus data reveals significant and systematic distributional trends across the disciplines, and a qualitative analysis confirms that these trends are motivated by genre-specific purposes and discipline-specific practices, respectively.