The diachronic change in linguistic positivity in the academic book reviewing of language studies: a text-mining analysis

Previous studies found an increasing trend of linguistic positivity in academic texts. That is, there is a tendency towards using more positive language than negative language in academic writing. However, most of these studies included research articles as the corpus data. Little is known about whether such a trend exists in book reviews, an important academic genre that features evaluative language. Thus, this paper presents a pilot study on the features and temporal dynamics of the positive/negative language of book reviews in the discipline of linguistics. Based on a corpus of 1550 book reviews published between 1990 and 2020, it was found that book reviews have experienced a significant upward trend in terms of both positive words and sentiment scores. Possible reasons and implications of the findings are discussed.