Evaluative language in evaluative and promotional genres.

Genres may have a variety of ostensible purposes, and these can be more or less like one another and can thus be classified. Bhatia (1997, 2005) proposes that genres with similar purposes can be grouped together as genre colonies (as in termite colony), and gives examples of colonies of reporting genres and of promotional genres. The promotional colony includes both core promotional genres like advertising and book blurbs, and also genres which Bhatia believes have been 'colonised' by promotional genres (as in Britain colonised India), such as reference letters, book reviews and film reviews. I argue in this paper that book reviews are not promotional and to do that I shall use the dimension interestedness for classifying genres, in order to use promotional later for a discourse type.