Abstract
This chapter examines the reviewers’ reports from a pragmatics point of view. In particular, it looks at how reviewers ask for changes to be made to submissions drawing on shared understandings of the relationship between literal meanings and intended meanings as they do this. The aim of this analysis is to give academic authors an understanding of the way in which they need to read reviewers’ reports. The chapter argues that many of the comments that reviewers make in their reports need to be read in ways other than what their literal meaning might suggest. The analysis is then considered in relation to the responses the reviewers gave in the questionnaires about their experience in doing peer reviews and how this impacted on the ways in which they wrote their reports. The reviews are also considered in relation to the language background of the reviewers in terms of whether they were native or native speakers of English as this has been suggested by previous research as something that might affect how they wrote their reviews.
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Paltridge, B. (2017). Pragmatics and Reviewers’ Reports. In: The Discourse of Peer Review. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-48736-0_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-48736-0_3
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