This study investigates exemplification in biological science book reviews through a corpus-based local grammar approach. Although previous studies have examined exemplification in research articles, student writing, English as an academic lingua franca, and AI-generated texts, little attention has been paid to how examples function in academic book reviews, especially in the sciences. To address this gap, we compiled a corpus of 100 expert-written biological science book reviews comprising 99,664 words and manually analysed 452 functional instances of exemplification in terms of markers and local grammar patterns. The findings show that exemplification is strongly marker-led, with such as, including, include(s)/included, and for example accounting for 73.1% of all instances. The two most frequent local grammar patterns were PA1: Exemplified + Indicator + Exemplification-SC and PA2: Exemplified + Indicator + Exemplification-BC, which together accounted for 71.4% of the instances. PA1 typically specifies broader biological categories through concrete examples such as species, habitats, methods, or processes, whereas PA2 draws examples directly from the reviewed book, including its chapters, topics, case studies, illustrations, and other features. Importantly, the evaluative patterns also show that reviewers use such examples to substantiate praise and specify the grounds for criticism or limitation. Thus, exemplification enables reviewers to move from general judgements to identifiable disciplinary or textual evidence, making their evaluations more concrete, accountable, and persuasive. The findings extend existing local grammar descriptions by identifying Exemplification-BC as a genre-sensitive category and offer useful implications for research on academic book reviews and English for Academic Purposes pedagogy.

Keywords: Exemplification; local grammar; biological science; academic book reviews; corpus-based

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