«It's not Always Clear…»: Negation Strategies in Russian Dissertation Reviews

The study aims to develop a typology of the communicative strategies of negation. The typology is based on the concept of «ethics of expert evaluation' as a system of conventional rules and limitations, which regulate evaluative activities of the expert. The relevance of this study stems, on the one hand, from the growing role of peer review in the modern academic certification system, and on the other, from the insufficient research into the communicative potential of negation in the genre of dissertation review. The corpus includes 60 Russian-medium reviews of dissertations. The study demonstrated that negation is a flexible rhetorical tool that allows for solving controlling the tone of criticism and maintaining a professional dialogue with the applicant. The distribution of negation functions between interactional (72.9%) and interactive (27.1%) types reflects two interrelated aspects of the expert’s evaluative activity. The predominance of interactional functions is associated with the need to manage interpersonal relationships, while the interactive functions serve the logical and argumentative aspect of the evaluation, structuring critique. The qualitative analysis revealed seven communicative strategies of negation: problematization, diplomacy, assertion of an expert position, communicative balance, refutation, epistemic categorization, and legitimation. The hierarchy of these strategies reflects the fundamental contradiction of the review genre: the opponent must be simultaneously a critic and a diplomat, an expert and an interlocutor. The results contribute to our understanding of the communicative strategies of scientific communication and expand theore-tical understanding of the role of negation in evaluative genres.