This book examines the argumentation strategies employed by linguists in voicing criticism, looks for explanations for confrontation in academic discourse, and evaluates the positive and/or negative effects it has on international academic communication. Issues such as the role of intertextuality, cross-cultural variations, and the notion of “academic discourse community” are also touched upon. Special attention is paid to the modern developments in contrastive rhetoric studies, as well as to the controversial issue of the use of context-based versus corpus-based methods. The corpus under investigation consists of academic book reviews in English and German with a clearly stated negative character, as well as a series of publications in English interrelated by the fact that they discuss a common group of problems but from two fully confrontative points of view. They illustrate what has been called an “academic war”. Some related theoretical issues are also discussed, including the role of evaluation in academic communication, the relationship between criticism, critique, negative evaluation, and confrontation in academic communication, as well as the importance of culture, discipline culture, and communities of practice. The contrastive discourse analysis demonstrates differences between English and German in terms of the rhetorical strategies employed by review writers to express criticism. The book will be of interest to researchers in the fields of academic communication and rhetorics, as well as teachers in English/German for academic purposes.
