| Reporting, as an indispensable part of academic writing, is massively used by graduate students in their theses to repot previous researches and introduce their own researches. The subcategories of metadiscourse such as attitude markers, self-mentions and evidentials are frequently found in reporting sentences. They play essential roles in reporting, which is mainly reflected in the following aspects:attitude verbs often function as reporting verbs in reporting sentences, foregrounding the authors’attitudes toward the reported content; self-mentions "I" and "we", in many cases, serve as the subjects of reporting verbs; Evidentials, usually in the forms of "According to X""Z states ", give us a clue to study reporting forms. Thus these three metadiscourse subcategories may provide us perspectives to study the linguistic phenomenon-reporting.By examining the use of the above mentioned three metadiscourse subcategories in reporting sentences, this thesis attempts to explore the similarities and distinctions in the features of reporting verbs, reporting subjects and reporting forms between English M. A. theses written by Chinese English learners(hereafter as CLE) and native English speakers(hereafter as NSE). Further more, we are to find out the problems in Chinese students’use of reporting and come up with corresponding solutions. Adopting a corpus-based approach, we’ve built two separate corpora by collecting47M. A. theses written by CLE and NSE. Items that are to be studied in this research are labeled when reading through the texts, and then Wordsmith, a corpus-searching software is adopted to search all these items for further comparison and analysis. Quantitative and qualitative approaches are combined in this study for data analysis.The results reveal that there are some considerable similarities as well as remarkable differences in the use of reporting between the two corpora. Specifically, in terms of reporting verbs (RVs), both CLE and NSE employ research verbs the most frequently. Although attitude verbs merely take a small proportion in all kinds of reporting verbs, they play a significant role in constructing discourses and conveying authors’attitudes toward the reported messages. Compared with NSE, CLE use attitude verbs much more frequently which indicates CLE tend to adopt RVs that are not so assertive in order to exempt themselves from responsibility. Larger in the number of attitude verbs, CLE’s corpus is found smaller in vocabulary when compared with NSE’s corpus, which suggests that CLE may overuse some attitude verbs while neglecting others. With regard to the subjects of RVs, human names and non-human subjects dominate both corpora. First-person pronouns are less frequently used than other types of subjects and they mainly appear in self-reporting sentences emphasizing the authors’contribution and their researches. CLE’s corpus displays a much lower frequency in the use of the first-person pronouns when compared with NSE’s corpus, which is especially true in the use of the singular form "I". CLE seldom use "I" and even tend to avoid employing "I" in their theses. Talking about reporting forms, CLE show great preference to integral reporting, especially the form of integral author/reporting verb, which leads to the monotony and platitude in reporting forms. Different from CLE, NSE can use multiple reporting forms flexibly in their theses, striking a balance between integral and non-integral reportings.This thesis attempts to provide new insights into reporting in M. A. theses in contrastive study. By comparing the similarities and differences in reporting used by CLE and NSE from the perspectives offered by three metadiscourse subcategories, the present study intends to help Chinese learners of English understand the functions of metadiscourse in reporting and use reporting better. Besides, it is expected that this study may contribute to relevant classroom teaching in writing theses and research articles. |
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