| Reporting verbs,an important linguistic phenomenon in academic writing,play a significant role in establishing the writer's own claims and situating these claims within published research.The present study is based on about 1000,000 words' self-based corpora of research articles to analyze the features of reporting verbs in social sciences and natural sciences research articles.Social sciences corpus and natural sciences corpus contains 75 research articles,including about 500,000 words respectively.All of the research articles are written by English native speakers and downloaded from Science Direct.The present research is based on the taxonomies of reporting verbs proposed by Thompson and Ye(1991)and Hyland(1999)to investigate frequency features'studies,grammatical features' studies from the perspectives of tense and voice,and semantic features' studies from the perspectives of denotation and evaluation.The results indicate that there are some same and different features in the usages of reporting verbs between social sciences and natural sciences research articles.As to frequency studies,it is found that find is the most frequently appeared reporting verb in both social sciences and natural sciences research articles.The frequencies of propose,consider,believe,note,define,emphasize and agree in both social sciences and natural sciences research articles are more or less the same and have no significant differences.As to the related reporting verbs in the present study,the frequency of total reporting verbs in the social sciences research articles is as twice as the frequency of those in the natural sciences research articles.The frequencies of find,suggest,examine,observe,study,report,discuss,investigate,present and reveal in the research articles of social sciences are more than those in natural sciences research articles,which they are significantly different The frequency of conclude in the research articles of natural sciences is more than that in research articles of social sciences,which means they are significantly different.In terms of grammatical studies,the writers of both social sciences and natural sciences research articles use much more present tense and active voice in academic writing.The writers of social sciences research articles use relatively more present tense and active voice,however,the writers of natural sciences research articles use relatively more past tense and passive voice.The semantic studies find that research verb is the most frequently used kind of reporting verbs in both social science and natural sciences research articles from the perspective of denotation studies,and positive verb is the most frequently used kind of reporting verbs in both social sciences and natural sciences research articles from the perspective of evaluation studies.The research findings may help Chinese Learners of English as a Foreign Language choose the reporting verbs accurately,express their attitudes,thoughts and aims appropriately,and help them improve abilities to structure their research articles discourses. |
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