A Comparative Study Of Reporting Verbs In M.A.Theses By Chinese English Majors And In Academic Journal Articles By International Scholars

Reporting verbs(RVs)in academic writing are an important device for writers to establish their own research position and to make their research more persuasive by reporting previous views or findings.This thesis is about a comparative study of the usage of RVs between two corpora: one is composed of fifteen M.A.theses written by Chinese English majors,the other is composed of fifteen academic journal articles by international scholars.This study tries to find out their similarities and differences in the use of RVs and then help advanced English learners in China better master the proper use of RVs in academic writing.Based on and Hyland's(1999)semantic classification of RVs and tense choices of RVs,in this study,a classification framework,which categorizes RVs from the perspectives of denotation and evaluation,was adopted to retrieve RVs from the corpora and analyze their usages.The research finds that there is a similar distribution of various categories of RVs in M.A.theses by Chinese English majors and in academic articles by international scholars.However,compared with their use in scholars' writings,RVs used in the M.A.theses are smaller in amount and narrower in range.In terms of denotation,the postgraduates use cognitive verbs and procedure verbs more frequently than international scholars.In terms of evaluation,from the semantic perspective,the postgraduates prefer factive RVs and neutral non-factive RVs;from the perspective of tenses,the postgraduates overuse present simple tense and underuse present perfect tense.Besides,they tend to misuse both tenses.In sum,China' English-major postgraduates are able to select proper types of RVs for different academic purposes,but inadequacy is still clear in their knowledge of the functions of RVs,academic writing ability and awareness of cross-cultural differences behind language.