universidade federal de santa catarina pós-graduação em letras ...

237for the formal opening in BRs, and especially Sub-function 10, responsible for theclosings, is greatly enhanced in linguistics BRs.• Sub-function 2: Informing about potential readershipIn linguistics, the reviewer frequently comments on the appeal the book has for thereader, either criticizing or praising the author for the attention given to the potentialreadership. A great number of references to the potential readership may be due to whatreviewers understand to be a high level of competition for readership in the linguisticdiscourse community. According to Fredrickson and Swales (1994:4):...the greater the competition in a territory (as measurable by number of researchpapers per topic area, conference/journal acceptance rate, promotion criteria,percentage of funded proposals, etc.) the greater the rhetorical effort authors willhave to expend in order to create research spaces for themselves.’This idea originally relates to writers of research articles but could be extended tobook writers also. In view of its significantly greater tradition in book reviewing,linguistics, as an applied area, seems more likely to produce books than, for example,physics, where the lack of a tradition in book reviewing indicates that books have beenmassively substituted by other forms of knowledge production (Becher 1987; Chen,1976). (As has been found out in the present research, as many as 70% of the top twentylinguistics journals carry a BR section, as compared to only 35% in chemistry and 40%in economics.) This greater tendency in producing knowledge in book-form wouldcreate greater competition for readers’ attention and therefore would offer reviewers