POZITIVNA EVALUACIJA U NEGATIVNOJ KRITICI: TIPOVI I FUNCIJE (NA PRIMERIMA IZ MEĐURATNIH BROJEVA JUŽNOSLOVENSKOG FILOLOGA)

Abstract

The paper examines positive commentaries in academic reviews that convey predominantly negative evaluation of either the reviewed material or its authors. The corpus consists of thirty-six reviews published in South Slavic Philologist throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Formal, semantic analysis showed that positive and negative assessments stand in two types of relations: adversative and concessive. Further, functional analysis showed that the function of positive assessment and its position in reviews correlate. While a number of positive remarks per review have been observed, in the majority of excerpted examples positive evaluation does not actually communicate positive meaning. Instead, it either introduces or emphasises negative comments. Much rarer instances of genuinely positive opinion were found in concluding and, to an extent, introductory segments.