Hedging and boosting criticism in dissertation thesis reviews

english

2025

volume 22, issue 2

boosting   criticism   dissertation review   facework   hedging   reviewer

Univerza v Ljubljani, Filozofska fakulteta
(Obvezni izvod spletne publikacije)

Dissertation thesis reviews within the Czech academic context are, unlike journal article peer reviews, non-blind, non-anonymous, publicly available texts. The key feature of these reviews is evaluation, and they require a substantial amount of facework aimed at both the direct and the potential indirect participants. The present paper focuses on the critical comments, their content, strength, directness, and manner of formulation in a corpus of 32 reviews of technical university dissertations. All instances of criticism were analysed in terms of the use of hedges and boosters as important interactional metadiscoursal devices. These were then further scrutinized with regard to their lexical and syntactic properties. The results indicate that the reviewers are highly aware of the face-threatening nature of the genre and tend to shy away from direct criticism. The main aim of the present research is to enhance the awareness of the genre itself and the linguistic and metalinguistic evaluative features.

20.10.2026