Detail publikačního výsledku

Praise as a face-threatening speech act in dissertation reviews

ZMRZLÁ, P.; SUČKOVÁ, M.

Originální název

Praise as a face-threatening speech act in dissertation reviews

Anglický název

Praise as a face-threatening speech act in dissertation reviews

Druh

Abstrakt

Originální abstrakt

The main function of the dissertation review is to inform the home institution whether or not the dissertation displays characteristics of high-quality scientific research and to recommend or discourage awarding of the PhD degree to the candidate. In short, dissertation reviews evaluate—and evaluation, especially public evaluation, is always a risky business from the perspective of politeness theories. In this paper, we focus on praise, i.e. positive evaluation, as expressed in a sample of 32 English-medium reviews of dissertations submitted for defense at a Czech technical university. We discuss the various politeness considerations associated with praise within this genre, analyze which features of dissertations typically get praised, and examine hedging and boosting expressions employed by the reviewers to modulate the impact of their compliments given that praise, as unintuitive as it may seem, is not a speech act devoid of face-threatening aspects (Brown & Levinson, 1987).

Anglický abstrakt

The main function of the dissertation review is to inform the home institution whether or not the dissertation displays characteristics of high-quality scientific research and to recommend or discourage awarding of the PhD degree to the candidate. In short, dissertation reviews evaluate—and evaluation, especially public evaluation, is always a risky business from the perspective of politeness theories. In this paper, we focus on praise, i.e. positive evaluation, as expressed in a sample of 32 English-medium reviews of dissertations submitted for defense at a Czech technical university. We discuss the various politeness considerations associated with praise within this genre, analyze which features of dissertations typically get praised, and examine hedging and boosting expressions employed by the reviewers to modulate the impact of their compliments given that praise, as unintuitive as it may seem, is not a speech act devoid of face-threatening aspects (Brown & Levinson, 1987).

Autoři

ZMRZLÁ, P.; SUČKOVÁ, M.

Vydáno

21.01.2026

BibTex

@misc{BUT200847,
  author="Petra {Zmrzlá} and Magda {Sučková}",
  title="Praise as a face-threatening speech act in dissertation reviews",
  year="2026",
  note="Abstract"
}