The Tenses Of Reporting Verb In Literature Review Of Academic Paper

Reporting verb,as a kind of high-frequency words in English academic discourse,is an important medium to express the author's own opinions and attitudes.It can help the writers build their own research space and make their research more persuasive on the basis of others' previous studies.It is vital for a writer to properly use the reporting verb with an appropriate tense to introduce previous research and his own findings so that the writer can lay a solid foundation for the subsequent essay construction.Nowadays,it is found that a considerable portion of English major students are confused with how to correctly use and completely understand the tense of reporting verbs.When they report previous studies,they are usually inclined to use reporting verbs with simple present tense only.However,in the process of academic paper writing,the professional writers are accustomed to using reporting verbs with different kinds of tenses.Therefore,in this thesis,the author selects 30 academic papers from the Science Direct&Springer and makes a statistical study about the tense of the reporting verbs in 30 LRs of the academic papers.This study aims to probe into the distribution and application of RVs' tenses in LRs,and it puts forward two questions:1.What are the distribution features of the tenses of reporting verb in academic writing of literature review?2.What functions do the tenses of reporting verb have in academic writing of literature review?Based on Hyland's reporting verb classification model and Halliday's systemic functional grammar,this study uses qualitative and quantitative analysis methods to analyze the RVs' tenses in 30 LRs selected from 30 academic papers.The result shows that:1)In the literature review section,the tense of the reporting verbs mainly consists of three forms:the simple present tense(74.37%),the simple past tense(16.67%),and the perfect present tense(9.96%).The use of simple present is most frequent,and the frequency of it is obviously higher than that of other tense forms;Among the three types of reporting verbs,cognitive verbs and discourse verbs are usually used with the simple present,while research verbs are more frequently used with simple past tense.2)During the process of LR writing,the using of RVs with different tenses and the tense-alternation among different RVs are two ways to realize the tenses' functions,which include ideational function,interpersonal function and discourse function.The three functions of tense are of great significance to the construction of the article and the expression of the author's view and the realization of the author's intention.To sum up,this study can expand the research field of the reporting verbs and provide a new perspective for the analysis of the academic papers in the future.At the same time,it also provides some constructive enlightenment for English teaching and academic essay writing,which will help students cultivate their consciousness of tense and improve the students' overall level of essay writing.