Keywords
Abstract
Academics conducting research in the field of English for research purposes has long been attracted by the diversities in scientific discourse found in different fields of knowledge. Evaluation is commonly considered to be one of the universal characteristics of academic text and is textualised through a comprehensive set of language means. The author’s experience in academic language teaching for medical and dental students revealed that the absence of evaluative language is the noteworthy feature of academic texts written by L2 students. Language interference here combines with the lack of investigation into the language evaluation and into the strategies of its employment by medical and dental students. To describe language means of presenting evaluative semantics we created a corpus of 43000 words from renowned dental journals followed by its linguistic analysis. These results include major statistically significant strategies employed in the academic dental journal to express criticism and the main ways to hedge it. Major hedging strategies include the use of modal verbs, evaluative verbs, conditional clauses, and simultaneous use of praise and criticism. Aside stand strategies that allow switching the criticism from the personality of the author to different targets of criticism like general content or results. Results of the research are valuable both for students and researchers presenting their results in English to the leading international dental journals. The Enclosure presents mostly significant lexis employed in modern dental journals to express criticism.