The Construction Of Identity In Reporting Clauses

Reports, or citations, are the metalinguistic representations in the article, of an idea from another source. Reports, or citations play an important role in academic writing, and thesis writing is no exception. By citing previous researches, the research background is clarified and the latest scientific discoveries are listed out, which helps the author find supports for his position. Therefore, many researchers have conducted researches to investigate the frequency and impact of reporting verbs, trying to make classifications for reporting verbs. However, it is not difficult to find that so far little is known about the subjects of reporting clauses.Under the guidance of the framework of classifications of reporting clauses, the present study investigates the subjects of reporting clauses in the body part of masters theses, and makes a contrastive study of thesis writing of Chinese L2 learners and English native speakers.Through a corpus-based analysis, the study tries to answer the following questions:(1) Are there any differences in the overall distribution of reporting clauses with different subjects in CL2 LC and ENSC ? If any, what are the differences?(2) What’s the relation between reporting clauses with different subjects and writer’s identity construction? Are there any differences in identity construction between Chinese L2 learners and English native speakers?The present study selects 25 theses written by Chinese L2 learners and English native speakers who major in linguistics and applied linguistics from CNKI(China National Knowledge Infrastructure) and Proquest thesis database to build the observed corpus(CL2LC,Chinese L2 Learners Corpus) and the reference corpus(ENSC, English Native Speakers Corpus)respectively. With the help of the software Ant Conc, we can obtain the concordances which are used as reporting clauses in the two corpora. By counting and computing the frequencies of reporting clauses with different subjects, the differences in the overall distribution of reporting clauses in CL2 LC and ENSC are revealed. Finally, by text analysis we can contrast the differences in identity construction between Chinese L2 learners and English native speakers,trying to provide some implications for Chinese L2 learners’ thesis writing.This study finds out that there are significant differences in the overall distribution of subjects of reporting clauses in CL2 LC and ENSC. First of all, Chinese L2 learners show a significant underuse in personal subjects. Besides, the proportion of “it” as subject in ENSC is much less than that in CL2 LC. Furthermore, this thesis explores the role of reporting clauses with different subjects contributing to writer’s identity construction and reveals that Chinese L2 learners and English native speakers tend to choose different ways of identity construction,which are listed as follows:(1) Chinese L2 learners tend to attribute propositions to writers of external sources, while English native speakers incline to attribute propositions to themselves.(2)Chinese L2 learners’ overuse of other writer’s name as subjects of reporting clauses reveals the fact that they are inclined to list a great number of previous studies without further illustrations in their thesis writing.(3) Native speakers tend to construct an implicit identity, while Chinese L2 learners are inclined to make a clear and definite claim.Based on the above findings, some implications for Chinese L2 learners’ thesis writing are proposed. First of all, Chinese L2 learners should make endeavors to incorporate their opinions into the texts and employ more personal subjects in reporting clauses to build “an evaluative space”. Secondly, L2 learners should pay more attention to make the literature review more logical and well-organized. Lastly, L2 learners should strategically use two kinds of reporting verbs to construct a more flexible identity in thesis writing.