THE DISCOURSE STRUCTURE OF BOOK REVIEWS IN GHANAIAN NEWSPAPERS, 1950-2006

Over the past several years there has been a remarkable scholarly interest in the book review genre in the Euro-American academic world: its prototypicality and variations across disciplines, cultures, and time. Just like western scholars, among the community of African scholars resident in Africa, the book review plays a significant role in scholarly interactions. In Ghana, for instance, where the academic book publishing industry has become vibrant the book review plays an essential role in announcing new knowledge. However, investigations into the structure and possible cross-cultural variations of the genre in a non-native English context such as Ghana’s appear non-existent. This study extends research on book reviews to a non-native English context in order to investigate cross-cultural variations relevant to the genre. The study describes and accounts for the range and variability of sub-functions within the four-move structure originally devised by Motta Roth, and further explores the extent to which the social, political and cultural dynamics of the Ghanaian community have shaped the rhetorical moves made in the reviews.