Exploring the polyphonic dimension of academic book review articles in the discourse of linguistics

This paper aims to investigate the textual polyphony as manifested by interacting voices in the genre of the academic book review article from a disciplinary perspective. The analysis reveals interesting linguistic features which can shed light on the dialogic and argumentative dimension of the genre under examination. As a result of the analysis carried out, it emerges that linguistics book review articles are characterized by a significant presence of lexicalisations that represent argument as dialogic by making explicit reference to the roles of agreement and disagreement as the most representative in the genre and that contribute to involving the reviewer in an argumentative dialogue with a variety of “textual voices” (Thompson 1996).