A Contrastive Study Of Reporting Verbs In English Abstracts Of Chinese And English Journals On Foreign Language Teaching

The proper use of reporting verbs in the abstract,which is an important part of the paper,can better reflect the authenticity of the author's views on information description and its expression.Based on Hyland's classification framework of reporting verbs,this paper selects 150 abstracts of journal papers in Foreign Language Teaching and Research and Applied Linguistics respectively,and constructs two corpora,FLTRC(19853 words)and AL(24646 words),which are marked with Word software.After annotating and retrieving by Microsoft Word 2010 and AntConc 3.3.0,the distribution of high-frequency reporting verbs and the usage of different types of reporting verbs are explored,besides,the tense and voice of reporting verbs are analyzed.The purpose of this paper is to answer the following questions:1)What are the reporting verbs with high frequency used in Chinese and English journal papers abstracts?2)What are the characteristics of different categories reporting words in Chinese and English journal papers abstracts?3)How does the tense and voice of high frequency verbs distribute in Chinese and English journal papers abstracts? What are the reporting functions they convey?The results show that:(1)There are 187 types of reporting verbs in Foreign Language Teaching and Research corpus,appearing in 935 times,and 191 types of reporting verbs in Applied Linguistics,appearing 1311 times.The data indicates that the use of reporting verbs in domestic learners are still less than those in foreign learners.But compared with previous research results,domestic learners' awareness of the use of reporting verbs has strengthened gradually.(2)In the corpus of Foreign Language Teaching and Research,the top 10high-frequency verbs appear 273 times,while it appears 400 times in the corpus of Applied Linguistics.Also,there are 6 verbs show,find,investigate,use,examine and analyze in both corpora.Although the proportion of these six verbs in two corpora are in different,the use of reporting verbs in the two journals is basically similar.Because ofdifferent writing habits and contexts,learners need to choose appropriate verbs to express their positions.(3)The most frequently used verbs are discourse reporting verbs in the two corpora,followed by the research reporting verbs and cognition reporting verbs.Domestic and foreign scholars often use factive verbs to express their research results,use positive cognition verbs to express their positions,and use assurance discourse verbs to organize discourse.In the aspect of tense,the simple present tense,the past tense and the present perfect tense appear synchronously in the two corpora,and the learners use the simple present tense more to weaken the research time and show respect for the information reported.It is worth noting that there are also one case of present progressive tense and five cases of the simple future tense in Applied Linguistics corpus,which are more diversified than that of domestic corpus.In the aspect of voice,learners often choose the active tense to express the objective facts actively,but the use of the passive voice is also increased and the choice is more diverse than before.All in all,although the data shows that domestic scholars have begun to pay attention to the importance of reporting verbs in academic paper writing,the use of verbs is still relatively single.In the future paper writing,attention should be paid to the cultivation the awareness of using reporting verbs.