The Actual Use Of Reporting Verbs In English Journal Articles Of Economics

Reporting verbs are key components of reporting structures and citations,which in turn play an important role in English academic writing.Writers use reporting verbs to make reference to the source text,to support their argument and to show their stance.However,for Chinese learners of English,choosing proper reporting verbs can be a difficult task.This study tries to conduct a contrastive analysis of reporting verbs in English journal articles of economics written by native English speakers and Chinese researchers to find out the similarities and differences in four aspects: general distribution,denotation,evaluation and tense and voice,in hope of giving some implications to English academic writing,especially in the discipline of economics.The researcher collects 50 research articles in the field of economics,25 articles written by Chinese researchers of economics and 25 by native English speakers,and establish two corpora,CRE and NES,altogether 383,868 words,in order to conduct a contrastive study.The software AntConc3.4.3 is adopted as the instrument to select all reporting verbs from the two corpora.With four research questions,this research is conducted to study and compare reporting verbs from four perspectives.The first is to compare the general distribution patterns of reporting verbs in the two corpora,including frequencies and types of reporting verbs,as well as ten most frequently used reporting verbs.The second and third are to examine reporting verbs under the theoretical framework of Hyland’s,the taxonomy of reporting verbs in terms of types of activities they denotate and the evaluative potential they carry.At last,tenses and voices of reporting verbs are analyzed.Through comparison and analysis,Chinese researchers and native English speakers are found to display both similarities and differences in the use of reporting verbs.To summarize,five main similarities are found.First,in general,Chinese researchers use 5.41 kinds of reporting verbs,close to the type number per 10,000 words in NES,which is 5.20,suggesting that in the realm of economics,Chinese researchers are able to use reporting verbs as varied as native speakers.Second,interms of denotation,authors in both corpora have shown a marked disposition to use research verbs,which account for more than half of all instances in both corpora.Third,90.4% of the reporting verbs in CRE and 92.7% in NES are used by writers to report him or her as unclear towards the reported information,indicating that both Chinese researchers and native English researchers prefer to give no signal of their stance towards the reported information.Fourth,in terms of the author’s stance,both Chinese writers and the researchers whose native language is English,working in the realm of economics,use half of the reporting verbs to report the author as neutral.Fifth,with respect to voice and tense of reporting verbs,both Chinese researchers and native English speakers prefer to use active voice and present simple tense.Four differences are also found in the study.First,compared with native English speakers,Chinese researchers use reporting verbs 18.87 times per 10,000 words while the frequency of reporting verbs per 10,000 words in NES is 25.43,34.8%higher than that in CRE.Thus,it is safe to conclude that in the realm of economics,native English speakers resort to reporting verbs more frequently than Chinese researchers.Second,native speakers use counter-factive verbs twice and no critical verbs while Chinese researchers use three counter-factive verbs and two critical verbs.Given the larger size of NES,native English speakers tend to be more cautious in expressing their disagreement and criticism.The third difference lies in the fact that positive,neutral,and tentative reporting verbs distribute more proportionately in NES than in CRE and native speakers are able to use more types of reporting verbs with the varied evaluative potential,than Chinese researchers,to report the author as positive,neutral,and tentative.Fourth,passive voice accounts for more proportion in NES,21.9%,than in CRE,14.6%.