A Contrastive Study On Reporting Verbs And Their Stance Expressions In Literature Review Of Journal Articles By Chinese Scholars And English-speaking Scholars

This thesis compares the use of reporting verbs and their stance expressions in literature review of the international journals in applied linguistics field between Chinese and English native-speaker scholars.As a distinct type of reporting signal to refer to prior studies,appropriate use of reporting verbs and stance expressions can enhance the credibility of articles,which is particularly important in academic discourses.An overall review of related literature reveals that although reporting verbs have attracted great concern from scholars recently,and had achieved fruitful results in many aspects,most of the studies paid attention to the master theses between Chinese postgraduates and native speakers.However,studies on a thorough comparison about the reporting verbs and their stance expressions in the specific literature review section of academic articles written by Chinese scholars and native-speaker scholars published in the international journals are rare.Considering this context,the present study intends to explore whether scholars from different cultural backgrounds have different preferences to choosing different categories of reporting verbs and using reporting verbs to express different stances in the literature review of journal articles and attempts to find out the possible reasons.This study mainly adopts quantitative research method and all data are collected from two self-complied corpora(CLRs and ELRs),randomly selecting 80 articles in five authoritative international journals in applied linguistics field.CLRs and ELRs consist of all the literature review part of 40 journal articles written by Chinese scholars and English native-speaker scholars respectively.Based on the Hyland(2002)’s classification of reporting verbs,the present study identified and retrieved three categories of reporting verbs,Research Acts,Cognition Acts and Discourse Acts in two corpora,in virtue of the software AntConc 3.4.4w.The collected data were processed and analyzed through SPSS 17.0,which was employed to test whether there exists significant difference about the use of reporting verbs and their stance expressions between these two groups of scholars.Three rounds of data retrieval were conducted to guarantee the reliability of the research.Major research findings are summarized as follows.Firstly,both groups of scholars show high awareness of the use of reporting verbs in literature review,proved by the evidence that both corpora were found large quantity of reporting verbs.However,significant difference was found between two groups of scholars when selecting reporting verbs,which means they have different preferences in the use of reporting verbs.What’s more,English native-speaker scholars use far more reporting verbs than Chinese scholars.Secondly,the two groups of scholars show significant difference when using reporting verbs of Research Acts category to express stances.Comparatively,English native-speaker scholars remarkably are more willing to take a positive stance towards the judgment of authors owing to higher confidence.On the contrary,Chinese scholars are more conservative holding a more neutral stance when citing related studies.Thirdly,both groups of scholars have nearly same understanding about the stance expressions of Cognition Acts category and Discourse Acts category,without significant difference.They both tend to impute a positive stance to the cited author and avoid taking critical stance,or adopt a tentative verb to express their uncertainty towards the credibility and truthfulness of the cited claims rather than criticize the previous studies directly,out of the politeness principle.Even so,the English native-speaker scholars still bring out higher awareness to consider how to adopt reporting verbs to express stances appropriately,and they use them more flexibly and proficiently.Fourthly,when analyzing the high-frequent reporting verbs,it’s found that both groups of scholars have different preferences for the use of high-frequent reporting verbs,but they both prefer to employing reporting verbs of Research Acts high-frequently.To sum up,Chinese scholars are keeping pace with the English nativespeaker scholars in the use of reporting verbs and stance expressions in published academic articles.However,in general,English native-speaker scholars use reporting verbs and express stances more proficiently,flexibly and precisely than Chinese scholars.In conclusion,this study can enhance Chinese scholars’ recognition of appropriate use of reporting verbs and adopt them to express stances properly.Meanwhile,it’s also aimed to arouse the Chinese learners’ interest to strengthen their understanding of reporting verbs and their stance expressions in academic writing,sequentially to increase their academic writing ability.