Reviews of single-authored versus multiple-authored academic books : is two "less" than one?

Abstract

Although academic book reviews have been extensively discussed in a number of languages and in terms of a variety of factors, there is at least one point that has not yet been taken into consideration, namely the authorship factor (i.e. the number of the academic book authors) and its possible influence on evaluative language of the review. This assumption has given rise to the present study, which centres on a corpus-based analysis of one hundred linguistic book reviews with a half written by a single author and the other fifty being a collection of more than two authors. The investigation rests on Giannoni’s (2010) typology of academic values, from which three values, i.e. goodness, novelty and relevance and their lexical evaluative markers have been subjected to manual and automatic analyses with the aim to comparing and contrasting variation in value distribution in two corpora. Furthermore, the overall research findings have been presented in the form of the chi-square test in order to determine whether there exists any statistical significance between the selected categorical variables, and comment on accordingly.