| As an important way to report previous studies and findings, the usage of reporting verb is a significant criterion for evaluating English academic writings. Recently, the studies on reporting verbs have been proceeded at both theoretical and empirical levels. Numerous researchers have made comparative studies on reporting verbs used by native English speakers and L2 learners. However, few of them have compared the reporting verbs used by advanced Chinese English learners and expert writers.Therefore, based on the classification of reporting verbs proposed by Hyland (2002), this thesis attempts to explore the reporting verbs used in literature review sections in papers written by advanced Chinese English learners majoring in applied linguistics and expert writers. To be precise, the present study focuses on these three research questions: (1) What are the differences between these two writer groups in choosing types of reporting verbs? (2) What are the differences between these two writer groups in choosing tenses of reporting verbs? (3) What are the implications for L2 students to emulate experts in using reporting verbs?To answer these questions, two corpora, Chinese Postgraduate Corpus (CPC) and Expert Writer Corpus (EWC) are built for analysis. The CPC consists of 30 MA theses written by Chinese postgraduates majoring in applied linguistics, and the EWC includes 78 articles from international linguistic journals. The following findings are obtained from this study:(1) Both writer groups tend to use more discourse-act reporting verbs than research-act and cognition-act types, but reporting verbs used by expert writers are richer and more diverse; (2) The distribution of tenses of reporting verbs used by the two groups are quite similar, but Chinese postgraduates overuse the present tense to some extent and employ few present perfect tense; sometimes their tense choices are unmotivated grammatically or pragmatically; (3) Expert writers have better knowledge of the functions of tenses when making choices among the three major tenses and their usage of tenses with the same type reporting verbs is more reasonable.The results show that although they are able to select appropriate types of reporting verbs according to the contexts, the advanced Chinese English learners still need to substantially enhance their ability to diversify their expressions at issue and to make effective choice of the tenses for reporting verbs. In this sense, this thesis hopes to offer some reference for teaching English academic writing in China and to shed some light on the textual and pragmatic functions of reporting verbs in academic writings. |
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