A Comparative Study On Averrals And Attributions In English Academic Journals Of Engineering And Education

In the research of academic writing,citation and reporting have always been heated topics.How to report the views of others and accurately express one‘s opinions,namely averral and attribution mentioned in this thesis,is a big challenge for novice writers.This study mainly focuses on the features of collocates with ?that‘ in the disciplines of education and engineering to provide references for novice writers in their academic writing on how to establish one‘s stance through averral and attribution.In this study,20 papers,published by native English speakers,were selected respectively from the international academic English journals of engineering and education from the year 2017 to 2018(each discipline contains three journals).Two small corpora were established,with a total number of 282,446 words,composed of the abstracts and body parts of the papers.The research procedure is as follows.Firstly,Word Smith 6.0 was used to retrieve the occurrences of the collocates with ?that‘,from which those not functioning as reporting devices were removed,and the rest of the collocates were identified and classified to be averrals or attributions,according to their features and functions.Then,the occurrences of the collocates with ?that‘ in averral and attribution were calculated and recorded,followed by rounded analysis on the rhetorical function,tense,syntax,and sentence subject.Finally,a comparative study was conducted on averrals and attributions in the two corpora to locate the similarities and differences.The research results reveal that the list of the collocates with ?that‘,covering mainly reporting verbs,also includes linking verbs,prepositions,adjectives,and nouns.The four lemmas,?suggest‘,?indicate‘,?believe‘ and ?say‘ in the top-ten list of higher percentage of occurences are shared by both averral and attribution.The ?it‘ pattern and modal verbs are widely used by the authors to establish his or her personal stance.In addition to these collocates shared by both,?show‘,?is‘,?note‘,?mean‘,?clear‘,?assume‘ are also on the top-ten list of averral,while ?state‘,?argue‘,?believe‘,?report‘,?conclude‘,?show‘ are on the top-ten list of attribution.Besides,the present tense is prevalent in the category of averral,while the past tense is preferred by the authors in the category of attribution.Meanwhile,through the comparative study of the collocates with ?that‘ in the education and engineering,it can be concluded that there are almost no differences on the choices of the collocates in averral in the two disciplines,while they are diversified in attribution.Therefore,the conclusion can be drawn that disciplinary differences are mainly reflected in attribution.At the same time,this study adopts the analytic framework of the reporting clauses of Charles(2006),and makes a statistical analysis of the subject types of averral and attribution in the two disciplines.The research shows that both disciplines tend to use the more objective way to construct one‘s stance,compared with education,the tendency of engineering is more obvious.This study enables student writers or novice writers to understand the functions and the characteristics of the collocates with ?that‘ presented in the two disciplines,to master how to use the collocates with ?that‘ to accurately express their personal opinions,to report the views of others,and to construct their own propositions to help them improve their English academic writing.