| This thesis intends to make a comparative study of reporting verbs in master theses written by Chinese EFL learners and published journal articles by professional English writers. Motivated by genre analysis and contrastive rhetoric, the current study adopts Hyland’s (1999) taxonomy of evaluation in reporting verbs and investigates into the using of reporting verbs, aiming to find out the disciplinary and genre similarities and differences in terms of the evaluation, tenses and voices of reporting verbs and the underlying reasons for the similarities and differences.The whole corpora in the present study consisted of20master theses and20research articles, all published between2006-2011. The master theses were written by English majors of several different universities in China, while research articles were chosen randomly from five leading journals in the field of applied linguistics and literature. Word number of the present corpora amounts to444,072, which, according to Kennedy (1998), was suitable and effective for the present study.Both quantitative and qualitative approaches are taken in the study. The quantitative results were displayed and disciplinary and genre variations were summarized and described. The qualitative analysis was mainly adopted to explain the functions of different types of reporting verbs and tenses/voices usage, as well as the reasons for disciplinary and genre variations.The results of a detailed comparative analysis reveal that both similarities and differences are found in the use of reporting verbs by different writers. Generally speaking, student writers use more reporting verbs than professional writers and they are more conservative in expressing personal opinions and attitudes. Then tense and voice usage shows no clear genre variations. The disciplinary variations were typically reflected in the more discursive discourse convention and more involved writer identity in literature. Writers in the field of literature use more simple present tense and active voice to intrude into the discourse to signal their writer identity.This thesis may make some contributions to genre theory and contrastive rhetoric, in that more detailed understanding of two genres-master theses and research articles-and writing performances of writers from different cultural backgrounds are provided. It has also provided helpful data and examples for academic writing learning and teaching in second language acquisition filed in China. |
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