| Reporting verbs, an important linguistic phenomenon in academicwriting, play a significant role in establishing the writer’s own claims andsituating these claims within published research. And previously manystudies mainly focus on reporting verbs in English-language writings ofdifferent fields either by native English writers or non-English writers.Based on the previous research, this study aims to investigate thesimilarities and differences of reporting verbs in the literature reviewsections of master’s theses written by both native English writers andChinese English writers from lexical, syntactic and semantic perspectivesrespectively. In detail, the analysis reporting verbs itself, the tense ofreporting verbs belong to the lexical study, the integral and non-integralstructure belong to the syntactic study and the informative and descriptivereporting, the author acts and writer acts, the author stance and writerstance as well as the attitude to the claims are related to the semanticmeanings. Two corpora, corpus1and corpus2, have been built whichtotally contain60master theses written in English. Corpus1contains30English theses by native English writers and corpus2contains30Englishtheses by Chinese counterparts. Quantitative content analysis method isemployed to analyze the two corpora. The thirteen most frequently usedreporting verbs are tagged in both corpora, which are used as samples for later sample analysis. All the data are compared horizontally andvertically.The results show that native English writers use more reportingstatements than Chinese English writers in academic writing. Thedifference is that the Chinese English writers use more mental acts thanthe native English writers. Findings of this study can be used as a basisfor investigating in what way Chinese English writers use reportinglanguage differently compared with native English writers, and also canshed light on pedagogical implications of teaching academic writings toChinese English writers. |
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