A Corpus-based Study On Reporting Verbs And Their Stance Expressions In Applied Linguistic Journals By The Chinese Scholars And English Native Scholars

Academic writings focus on weighing up evidence,assessing sources and challenging claims,and reporting verbs are at the heart of performing these functions.This study mainly explores similarities and differences of reporting verbs used by the Chinese scholars and native scholars in terms of distribution,frequency of reporting verbs and corresponding stance expressions of theirs.The analysis is mainly based on Hyland’s(2002)framework and rhetorical function of reporting verbs.The present study adopts a quantitative method and builds the two corpora.The data is collected from two corpora,consisting of 40 research articles in Applied Linguistics written by the native English scholars and 40 research articles in Chinese Journal of Applied Linguistics written by the Chinese scholars.The results present that the Chinese and native scholars do have different preferences for choosing and using reporting verbs,and two groups of scholars have different conceptions on some reporting verbs.Native scholars use more reporting verbs of discourse act to construct academic discourse,while Chinese scholars use more reporting verbs of research findings and procedures to depict the experimental activities of previous research.Chinese scholars are more inclined than native scholars to take positive stance.Nevertheless,they both choose tentative reporting verbs rather than critical verbs to report when citing uncertain claims,and both tend to express positive or neutral stance towards the cited content instead of negative or critical stance towards views of other researchers.This study is to stimulate the awareness of differences between L1 and L2 academic writing and to help develop the L2 academic writing.It is hoped that this study will aid non-native English academic writers to perform appropriate references to others’ work,to have extensive communication with other experts and finally to construct a credible academic image.