I wanted to honour your journal, and you spat in my face: emotive (im)politeness and face in the English and Russian blind peer review

Abstract This study explores the degree to which politeness and emotive considerations are respected across two different academic traditions and linguistic settings; in Russian and English blind peer reviews. It analyses 120 authentic reviews (70 Russian and 50 British English) with the negative verdicts: “Reject” and “To be resubmitted after substantial revisions” using a pragmatic, contextual and contrastive methodology. Drawing on (im)politeness theory, intercultural pragmatics and cultural studies, we explore the construction of alternative meanings in reviewers’ messages, and theorize that consideration for the face requirements of the reviewee may account for the lingua-cultural choices of the reviewer. We explore structural, linguistic, communicative and stylistic differences in English and Russian reviews. The results show that despite reviewers’ individual styles there are some culture-specific traits in the styles of reviews. Emotive politeness, we have suggested, appears to be (pre)determined by the sociocultural context and is more typical of English communication than Russian. We account for the differences in terms of sociocultural context, value differences and the use of different mechanisms of politeness. Our results confirm that politeness is not only social, but is also a psychological phenomenon based on empathy, whose manifestations may vary across cultures.