Linguistic and cultural features of evaluation in academic expert com-munication (based on German and Russian academic reviews in Linguistics)

Linguistic evaluation in academic expert social and communicative practice is considered an expression of multi-addressed acts qualifying the paper under review and its author. These acts refer to normative criteria of scientific work and thus signal to the potential reader the social and professional identity of the reviewer being a member of the professional scientific community and a competent researcher. Despite the fact that axiological basis and criteria of scientificity have been broadly studied in Logics, Philosophy and Pragmatics, there is a lack of research on how reviewers relate to norms and standards of scientific communication in order to reveal their professional identity in evaluative acts embedded into academic expert communication. The article presents the results of a comparative socio-communicative and discourse study of assessment in German and Russian reviews in Linguistics. The purpose of the study was to examine the axiological bases – shared norms and standards of scientific work, that allow the reviewers to position themselves in the text as experienced researchers in their field. The results of quantitative and qualitative processing of data, contextual-semantic and linguistic axiological analysis confirm the general tendency of German and Russian academic expert discourses to verbalize rational assessments. In addition, the study reveals a number of cultural differences concerning the choice of certain bases for rational-evaluative statements by reviewers. The interpretation of the data results in constructing of cultural-specific assessment models, shaped into the form of field structures with axiological dominants typical of the German and Russian-speaking academic expert communities.