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.
