Negative evaluation in academic discourse. A comparison of English and Italian research articles

Drawing on a corpus of 20 research articles from Anglo-American and Italian journals in the same disciplinary area, this paper investigates the linguistic and pragmatic features underlying the more or less explicit criticism targeting other authors and their claims. Special attention will be given to the rhetorical strategies that convey negative evaluative acts, whose realisations may reflect both the genre and the different interpersonal understanding of the academic communities involved. The results point to interesting convergences/divergences between the two halves of the corpus and in the rhetorical and linguistic resources employed by English-speaking authors, as compared to their Italian colleagues.