Criticism mitigating devices in English and Lithuanian academic reviews

The analysis is based on a few theoretical assumptions. One of them is that politeness tends to be strategic in the sense that it employs a verbal strategy in order to attain some personal goal, i.e. to express the author’s opinion. Hence, the criticism in book reviews is strategic, since it involves strategic choices and their linguistic means. Moreover, it is conscious strategic behaviour in the sense of using means to get things done, in our case, obligatory criticism presented. Politeness involves ‘reflexive’ action, in the sense that it is not direct, naive, spontaneaous action, but rather reflected upon, deliberate, and premediated.” (Eelen 1999: 30). Another assumption concerns the object of analysis. In my view, linguistic strategies are Always discourse-based. The presentation of criticisms also obeys the principles of textual rhetorics, such as segmentation and ordering. Therefore, it is of paramount importance to take all the levels (sentence, paragraph, section and the full text) into consideration.This publication is the result of the conference “Language, diversity and integration in the Enlarged EU: challenges and opportunities” sponsored by The Ministry of Education and Science of The Republic of Lithuani