Abstract

Hyland (2005) presents a theoretical framework on metadiscourse to treat interaction between a text writer and the intended reader. Based on this model, any writer employs a number of devices such as positive and/or negative attitude markers (adjectives like eloquent, weak), hedges (adverbs such as maybe), and boosters (adverbs such as certainly) to convey the values of a phenomenon or the (un)certainty of expressed statement. This study takes Hyland (2005)’ model to provide a concrete scheme of book review genre in Persian language. As such, forty book reviews published in Iranian peer-reviewed linguistics journals are selected as the corpus of study, and the frequency of four discourse variables including positive attitude markers, negative attitude markers, hedges, and boosters are analyzed. The findings indicate that the negative attitude markers are the most frequent interaction devices. It is also shown that most discourse markers are used in the closing section of book reviews. In addition, the frequency of negative attitude markers as well as boosters in the corpus of male critics is higher than that of female ones giving weight to the gender divide over language use. It is also revealed that female critics mainly deal with the writer of the book to be reviewed while male critics mostly analyze the book itself.