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278readership. In addition, concepts do not seem to easily find consensual acceptanceamong practitioners in the field, even though, in some cases, they have been around for along time. A greater tendency to adopt a didactic perspective on linguistics BRs mayresult from the specific applied character of the discipline in opposition to chemistry andeconomics.7.3.2 Variation in choices of terms for praise and blameRhetorical moves in BRs associate description and evaluation components thatserve the purpose of describing certain features in the book (e.g., main theme andauthor) and evaluating the extent to which a book fulfills the needs of the field (such asrecency in the case of chemistry, readership demands in the case of linguistics, or stillmethodology (models) adopted in the case of economics). Following the line ofargumentation proposed by Becher (1981; 1987), I searched for terms that embodied thevalues of the discipline in terms of what is desirable or condemned in a book.Linguistics reviewers seem to favor the practice of standing out by referring tothose approaches they accept as the most appropriate to deal with the vast and, at times,imprecise repertoire of disciplinary problems. By regularly using references, reviewersalso seem to hold a desire to show that they are well read in the field, signaling saliencethrough the adoption of a tone of ‘authority writing to an audience of less experiencedprofessionals’. Chemists, on the other hand, seem secure of the grounds over which theirdiscipline stands and, therefore, convey an idea of greater internal consensus with littleneed to discuss basic concepts.