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

289recency in publication is a decisive criterion for quality used by reviewers in praising newpublications in short, generally descriptive texts, in which more space is left for thereader’s own evaluation. Reviewers in economics tend to emphasize models andmathematics when commenting the good points in a book, probably as an attempt toguarantee the ‘scientific’ status of their discipline. Economics BRs tend to be longer,explicitly evaluative texts, where the author of the book assumes a role of greaterexpressiveness. In linguistics, the role played by the readership constitutes a criterion inlong texts which combine detailed evaluation and description.Chemists can be said to use more objective language and disregard discussions ofbasic theoretical concepts and secondary sources than economists and linguists: chemistryhas a broader array of tacit knowledge shared by its members and thus favors internalconsensus. This “mature science” status seems to be enjoyed by chemistry and muchsought after by economists and linguists.Book reviewing as an academic genre takes into account specific disciplinary valuesto which reviewers respond when producing justificatory arguments for recommendingnew books. Reviewing journals as professional forums offer opportunities for disciplinarydebate involving a dynamic socialization between discipline members such as author,reviewer, journal editor and readership.Based on the information about the extent to which systematicity and variability ofcontextual and textual features occur in the corpus, it is reasonable to state that academicBRs constitute a genre. The defining limits for the genre can be said to have a concrete