Abstract In a context of increasing globalization of academic discourse, considerations of the impact of culture on different communicative genres and discursive practices become more relevant than ever, as the construction of pragmatic meaning and its appropriate interpretation by the recipient is seen to depend on lexico-grammatical features whose use is greatly affected by cultural factors. This paper concerns the genre of blind peer review, and examines how disagreement and negative evaluation are expressed in two cultural and linguistic settings, and to what extent they are mitigated. It is based on peer reviews submitted, in English and Russian, to the Russian Journal of Linguistics, in which the reviewer provides a negative evaluation (either “reject” or “to be resubmitted after substantial revisions”). Such reviews entail possible face damage, in the terms of (Brown and Levinson 1978); and therefore one might expect reviewers to engage in discursive strategies of mitigation. The paper analyses 120 authentic blind reviews (70 Russian and 50 British English), using a pragmatic, contextual and contrastive methodology. Drawing on discourse analysis, intercultural pragmatics, (im)politeness theory and cultural studies, we explore the construction of alternative meanings in reviewers’ messages, and theorise that consideration for the face requirements of the reviewee and politeness strategies, may account not only for individual but also culture-specific choices. The results show that, as well as variations in reviewers’ individual styles, there are some culture-specific traits in this area. Mitigation strategies are more typical of English communication than Russian. We account for these differences in terms of the sociocultural context, value differences and the use of different mechanisms of politeness. Our results suggest that politeness is based on different communicative styles and expressive traditions, which appear to vary across cultures.

中文翻译：

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英文和俄文盲目的同行评议中的机智或坦率

摘要在学术话语日益全球化的背景下，对文化对不同交际体裁和话语实践的影响的思考变得比以往任何时候都更为重要，因为人们认为语用意义的建构及其对接受者的恰当解释取决于词汇-语法特征的使用受文化因素的影响很大。本文涉及盲人同行评议的体裁，并考察了两种文化和语言背景下如何表达异议和负面评价，以及在多大程度上缓解了分歧和消极评价。它基于以英文和俄文提交给《俄罗斯语言学杂志》的同行评审，评审人员在其中给出了负面评价（“拒绝”或“经过实质性修订后将重新提交”）。按照（布朗和莱文森，1978年）的说法，这样的评论可能会造成面部伤害。因此，人们可能希望审稿人采用减缓的话语策略。该论文采用了一种务实的，情境化的和对比性的方法，对120条真实的盲目评论（70俄语和50英式英语）进行了分析。借助话语分析，跨文化语用学，（im）礼貌理论和文化研究，我们探索了审稿人信息中替代意义的构建，并得出理论认为，考虑到审阅人的面孔要求和礼貌策略，不仅可能考虑个人以及特定于文化的选择。结果表明，以及评论者个人风格的变化，该地区还存在一些特定于文化的特征。缓解策略在英语交流中比俄语更典型。我们从社会文化背景，价值差异和使用不同礼貌机制的角度考虑了这些差异。我们的研究结果表明，礼貌是建立在不同的沟通方式和表达传统的基础上的，而这种沟通方式和表现传统在不同文化中也有所不同。