reporting verbs in some articles on language research by english and vietnamese authors

Aim and objectives of the study This study aims to analyze the use of reporting verbs in linguistics research articles written by English and Vietnamese authors in their native language

MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING

HANOI OPEN UNIVERSITY

M.A THESIS

REPORTING VERBS IN SOME ARTICLES ON LANGUAGE RESEARCH BY ENGLISH AND

VIETNAMESE AUTHORS

Động từ tường thuật trong một số bài báo nghiên cứu

về ngôn ngữ của các tác giả người Anh và người Việt

NGUYỄN THỊ THẢO

Field: English Language Code: 8.22.02.01

MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING

HANOI OPEN UNIVERSITY

Động từ tường thuật trong một số bài báo nghiên cứu

về ngôn ngữ của các tác giả người Anh và người Việt

NGUYỄN THỊ THẢO

Field: English Language Code: 8.22.02.01 Supervisor: Assoc Prof Dr Phan Văn Quế

Hanoi - 2020

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CERTIFICATE OF ORIGINALITY

I, the undersigned, hereby certify my authority of the study project report entitled REPORTING VERBS IN SOME ARTICLES ON LANGUAGE RESEARCH BY ENGLISH AND VIETNAMESE AUTHORS submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master in English Language Except where the reference is indicated, no other person‟s work has been used without due acknowledgement in the text of the thesis

Hanoi, 2020

Nguyễn Thị Thảo

Approved by SUPERVISOR

Assoc Prof Dr Phan Văn Quế

Date:………

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to express my heartfelt gratitude to those who give me support and assistance in completing this thesis First and foremost, I am indebted to my supervisor Assoc Prof Dr Phan Văn Quế for his valuable guidance, encouragement, insightful advice, and constructive feedback throughout the entire period of writing the thesis I‟m deeply grateful to my family who always give me love, care, and unconditional support I also wish to thank my colleagues at Nguyen Duc Canh high school, in particular a special thanks to Mrs Khanh, the Head Master of the school who supported and encouraged me throughout the years This work would have never been possible without any of you

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Certificate of originality i

Acknowledgements ii

Table of contents iii

Abstract vi

List of tables and figures vii

Chapter 1: INTRODUCTION 1

1.1 Rationale 1

1.2 Aim and objectives of the study 2

1.3 Research questions 3

1.4 Methods of the study 3

1.5 Scope of the study 3

1.6 Significance of the study 4

1.7 Structure of the study 5

Chapter 2: LITERATURE REVIEW 6

2.1 Previous studies on reporting verbs in academic writing 6

2.1.1 Studies focusing on categories of reporting verbs 6

2.1.2 Studies focusing on tense usage of reporting verbs 10

2.1.3 Studies focusing on reporting verbs used in different disciplines 12

2.1.4 Studies focusing on reporting verbs used by different groups of authors 13 2.1.5 Studies focusing on comparisons in the use of reporting verbs by English native and non-native English authors 16

2.1.6 Studies focusing on reporting verbs in different languages in a comparison with English 17

2.1.7 Studies on reporting verbs in Vietnamese setting 18

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2.2 Reporting verbs 19

2.2.1 Definition of reporting 19

2.2.2 Reporting verbs in academic writing 21

2.3 Patterns and denotation functions of reporting verbs 22

2.3.1 Integral and non-integral citation patterns 22

2.3.2 Denotation functions of reporting verbs 23

2.4 Summary 25

Chapter 3: METHODOLOGY 26

3.1 Research approach 26

3.2 Methods of the study 26

3.3 Data collection and data analysis 27

3.3.1 Data collection 27

3.3.2 Data analysis 28

3.4 Summary 30

Chapter 4: REPORTING VERBS USED IN ENGLISH AND VIETNAMESE RESEARCH ARTICLES 31

4.1 Patterns where reporting verbs occur 31

4.2 Frequencies analysis of reporting verbs 33

4.3 Denotation functions of reporting verbs 38

4.3.1 English verbs used in denotation functions 38

4.3.2 Vietnamese verbs used in denotation functions 41

4.3.3 Comparison between English and Vietnamese verbs in denotation functions 44

4.4 Summary 48

Chapter 5: CONCLUSION 49

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5.1 Recapitulation 49

5.2 Concluding remarks 50

5.3 Limitation of the research 50

5.4 Recommendations and suggestion for further research 51

REFERENCES 52 APPENDICES I

A Categories of common reporting verbs according Hyland‟s (2002) framework I

B Corpus of the study II

2010 to 2015 Fifteen of the articles were written in English, by native English speakers and published in Journal of English for Academic Purposes The other fifteen articles were written by Vietnamese authors in Vietnamese and published in Language & Life Magazine 93 different verbs with 415 instances in the English corpus and 67different verbs recorded 183 occurrences in the Vietnamese corpus are found Generally speaking, both English and Vietnamese authors are fully aware

of functions of reporting verbs in academic writing However, English authors use more reporting verbs than Vietnamese authors Regarding denotation functions of reporting verbs in Hyland‟s (1999) framework, reporting verbs from Research Acts category are employed more frequently in the English corpus than in the Vietnamese corpus, but Cognitive Acts verbs occur in the Vietnamese corpus more frequently Findings of this study can be used as a basis for investigating why Vietnamese learners of English use reporting language differently compared with native speakers of English, and also can shed light on pedagogical implication of teaching academic writing to Vietnamese learners of English

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LIST OF TABLES AND FIGURES

Table 2.1: Common reporting verbs in Research Acts category 23

Table 2.2: Common reporting verbs in Cognition Acts category 24

Table 2.3: Common reporting verbs in Discourse Acts category 24

Table 3.1: Details of the two corpora 27

Table 3.2: Word and citation counts in the two corpora 28

Table 4.1: Frequency of reporting verbs in the two corpora 34

Table 4.2: Top reporting verbs in the two corpora 34

Table 4.3: Reporting verbs occurred only once in the two corpora 38

Table 4.4: Distribution of English verbs in denotation function 39

Table 4.5: Distribution of Vietnamese verbs in denotation function 41

Table 4.6: Comparison in the use of English and Vietnamese verbs 44

Table 4.7: Distribution of English verbs in other studies 45

Table 4.8: Comparison in the use of Chinese and Vietnamese verbs 47

Figure 2.1: Classification of reporting verbs by Thompson & Ye (1991) 8

Figure 2.2: Classification of reporting verbs by Hyland (2002) 10

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Chapter 1: INTRODUCTION 1.1 Rationale

Nowadays, although much of the research throughout the world is carried out

by researchers who are not native English speakers, their scientific findings are mostly reported in this language As a result, English academic writing is a skill much needed by many researchers who are not only non-native English speakers but also native ones It is proposed that academic writing follows a certain rhetorical, grammatical, and stylistic patterns for developing the general semiotic system to have effective scientific discourse In the last few decades, there has been

a great amount of interest in the study of academic writing whose focus covers the studies of genre, content, grammatical complexity, lexical diversity to more specific language features such as modality, redundancy In academic writing it will often be necessary to refer to the research of other authors and to report on their findings This process of referring to previous studies is called citation Citation is a rhetorical device that plays a key role in academic writing It indicates that the author understands the previous works, makes the author as a member of the disciplinary community, and helps the author to promote his/her research In order

to do citation, researchers have to use reporting verbs which is considered as one of the most crucial components in citation process

The difficulty with using reporting verbs is that there are many different verbs, and each of them has slightly different and often subtle shades of meaning As the theory implies, the variation of the use of reporting verbs indicates that reporting verbs used in research articles carry out different function and communicative purposes The appropriate choice of reporting verbs in citation is crucial not only in establishing the author‟s own claims but also in situating these claims within previously published research Hyland (1999, 2002) considered reporting verbs as one of the lexical devices that researchers need for expressing their stance in an academic paper and aligning themselves with readers In this perspective, reporting verbs in academic writing might be seen as rhetorical attributions that are used to help authors‟ convince readers that authors‟ claims are significant and reasonable Moreover, by learning how to use reporting verbs in citing works of other authors properly, it can help authors to avoid plagiarism

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Regarding their importance in academic writing, a great number of studies on reporting verbs have been conducted from various disciplines as well as their use by different groups of researchers To the best knowledge of the author, most of the studies on reporting verbs were done abroad and they focused on international settings There is a lack of studies done in the Vietnamese context related to reporting verbs, except the papers by Nguyen & Pramoolsook (2015a, 2015b, 2016), Nguyen (2014, 2017), and unpublished master thesis by Hoang (2018) Nguyen & Pramoolsook (2015a, 2015b, 2016) and Nguyen (2014, 2017) focused on analyzing reporting verbs used by Vietnamese master students while Hoang (2018) studied signal functions of reporting verbs in English and Vietnamese based on English novel “The Lost Symbol” and its Vietnamese translated version From here,

it can be seen that more research in reporting verbs, particularly in English Language Studies needs to be done in Vietnamese setting Deriving from the above listed reasons, the present study was an attempt to compare the use of reporting verbs by Vietnamese authors and English authors in their native language in the field of language teaching and applied linguistics In this thesis, it is not our ambition to provide a thorough analysis on the use of reporting verbs in Vietnamese research articles and English articles, but rather to bring certain insight into this field

1.2 Aim and objectives of the study

This study aims to analyze the use of reporting verbs in linguistics research articles written by English and Vietnamese authors in their native languages in order to find out similarities and differences in the structures where reporting verbs occur and denotation functions of reporting verbs In order to obtain this particular aim, we highlight the specific objectives of this study below:

 to explore the patterns where reporting verbs occur in linguistics research articles written by English and Vietnamese authors;

 to investigate what reporting verbs are used and their frequencies in linguistics research articles written by English and Vietnamese authors;

 to find out the similarities and differences of denotation functions of reporting verbs used in linguistics research articles written by English and Vietnamese authors

1.4 Methods of the study

In order to identify, describe, interpret, and analyze the data the current study uses qualitative research approach The corpus consists of thirty papers published in linguistics journals Fifteen of the articles were written in English by native English authors and published in Journal of English for Academic Purposes The other fifteen papers were all written in Vietnamese and published in Language & Life Magazine (Tạp chí Ngôn ngữ và Đời sống) These two corpora were then analyzed

by the author to find any reporting verbs which were used to refer to previous works The verbs were tallied, recorded, and then classified in terms of denotation functions of reporting verbs according to Hyland‟s (1999) framework In the next step, the author employed description and contrastive technique to highlight main features in using reporting verbs by Vietnamese and English authors from which the similarities and significant differences in using reporting verbs in two groups of authors were drawn Finally, the obtained results are compared with already known results to generalize the conclusions and implications in teaching and learning

1.5 Scope of the study

Scope of the present study situates in similarities and differences in using reporting verbs between English and Vietnamese authors to make reference to previous works in their academic writing of their own languages in terms of frequency, and signal functions of reporting verbs In regard of frequency we will point out which reporting verbs are mostly used and evaluate the use of them Concerning the functions of reporting verbs, we focus on denotation categories based on the indicator given by Hyland (1999) According to the type of activity they referred to, authors can use three types of reporting verbs: Research Acts,

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Cognitive Acts, and Discourse Acts which are corresponding to three distinguishable processes: Reporting something the cited author did, Reporting the cited author‟s opinion, reporting something the cited author stated

1.6 Significance of the study

Although previous works contribute a lot to the study of reporting verbs in academic writing, the majority of these studies only focus on English-language Few studies made a thorough comparison between how other-language authors and English-language authors use reporting verbs in their native language from perspectives of reporting structure, reporting forms, reporting signals, and reporting functions To the best knowledge of the author, there exists no research on reporting verbs based on linguistics research articles written by Vietnamese authors Therefore, the present work plays a certain role in both theoretical and practical aspects in the field of linguistics in the Vietnamese setting

Theoretically, this study brings a certain insight into in the field of study on citation in academic writing in Vietnamese setting More precisely the current research gives an overview of how Vietnamese authors use reporting verbs in their research papers and clarify the similarities and differences in using reporting verbs between Vietnamese authors and English authors in their native language Findings

of this study can be used as a basis for investigating why Vietnamese learners of English use reporting language differently compared with native speaker of English Practically, to students, using correct reporting verbs in appropriate context is

a difficult target to achieve in academic writing There are a number of reporting verbs that can be utilized in writing the claims, which carry their own effects on the statements concerned In fact, there are lists of reporting verbs that serve the same functions for the students to use to vary their writing, while different reporting verbs serve different functions, and hence, they have different effects on their academic writing Hence, using reporting verbs appropriately is a crucial skill for students, in particular for those in academic purpose program The suggestion to consider is to equip the master students with the knowledge of using reporting verbs in a Research Methodology course Thanks to the results of this research, some notifications will

be identified to help students to focus more on the meaningful elements of reporting and avoid the frequent mistakes made in wring their thesis and other academic reports later Moreover, results of this research can be served as a reference for

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teachers and instructors in designing their material in Research Methodology course

1.7 Structure of the study

This thesis consists of five chapters The Introduction chapter introduces rationale of the research, clarifies the aim and objectives as well as formulates research questions and outline of the thesis In the next chapter Literature Review

we summarize some previous studies on reporting verbs in academic writing in various directions Then the definitions of reporting, reporting verbs and their use in academic writing are recapitulated In the last part of this chapter we recall Hyland‟s (1999) classification of reporting verbs in terms of their denotation functions which are chosen as the theoretical framework for analyzing reporting verbs in this current research Methodology of this study is introduced in Chapter 3, which describes research approach, research method, data collection, and data analysis in detail Afterwards, Chapter 4 focuses on the results of this study and discussion of related findings In this chapter, answers to research questions raised

in the introduction chapter are provided In the final Chapter 5 conclusions are drawn to general findings of this study, limitations of this study stated, suggestions

to teaching and learning addressed and recommendations put forward for the future research

as their use by different groups of authors including master students, doctoral students, researchers or English speaking and non-English speaking authors Some studies that are to be highlighted are Thompson & Ye (1991) and Hyland (1999, 2002) which play as theoretical framework for other researchers In this section we review those studies of reporting verbs in the following aspects:

 Studies focusing on categories of reporting verbs

 Studies focusing on tenses of reporting verbs

 Studies focusing on reporting verb used in different disciplines

 Studies focusing on reporting verbs used by different groups of authors

 Studies focusing on comparison in the use of reporting verbs by English native and non-native authors

 Studies focusing on reporting verbs in different languages in a comparison with English,

Besides that we also review studies of reporting verbs in Vietnamese settings which have a close relation to our investigation We would like to emphasize that, there are some overlaps between the above mentioned directions, for example, there are some studies on the use of reporting verbs by master students based on a certain discipline or multi-disciplines

2.1.1 Studies focusing on categories of reporting verbs

Most researchers focus on the categories of reporting verbs in connection with their functions in expressing writers‟ process or stance For simplicity, in this section the term “author” is used to refer to the person who is reporting and

“author” to refer to the person who is being reported Thompson and Ye were the pioneers to the categorization of reporting verbs Considering the role of reporting

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verbs in the citation process, Thompson & Ye (1991) made a specific contribution

by scrutinizing reporting verbs used in academic settings which can guide writers to evaluate their choices and subsequently categorize them They adopted a corpus approach to their research of over a hundred journal introductions in diverse fields, and afterwards classified the reporting verbs in terms of their semantic differences, which they argue perform the functions of denotation and evaluation With respect

to the denotation of reporting verbs, Thompson & Ye (1991) categorized them under two broad categories depending on who the responsibility of process is attributed to The first one refers to those verbs which report the author of the text being quoted; hence it is labeled “author acts” This category includes three subcategories: textual, mental, and research verbs concerned with three activities writing, thinking, and finding The second category is “writer acts” which shows the writers position to the topic being investigated while referring to previous works This category is also composed of two main subcategories: “Comparing” verbs and

“Theorizing” verbs “Comparing” verbs such as “correspond to” and “contrast with” attribute the study of the author with a given point of view “Theorizing” verbs, on the other hand, benefit writers through providing them with gaining the advantage

of the author‟s study in developing their arguments

On the other part, Thompson & Ye (1991) classified evaluation reporting verbs into three subcategories; writer‟s stance, author‟s stance, and writer‟s interpretation The distinction is made at two levels; the distinction between the author and the writer and the distinction between stance and interpretation Author's stance is the attitude which the author is reported as having towards the validity of the reported information or opinion including positive, negative, and neutral There are also three options can again be identified in writer‟s stance: factive, non-factive, and counter factive Both author's stance and writer's stance are concerned basically with the truth/correctness or otherwise of the reported proposition Writer's interpretation, on the other hand, is concerned with various aspects of the status of the proposition Thompson & Ye (1991) identified four main options open to the writer: author's discourse interpretation, author's behavior interpretation, status interpretation, and non-interpretation Classification of reporting verbs by Thompson & Ye (1991) is illustrated in Figure 2.1

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Subsequent research studies following Thompson & Ye (1991) have, to different extents, adapted the framework (Thomas & Hawes, 1994; Hyland, 1999 & 2002) Hyland (1999), for instance, investigated eighty research articles from eight diverse fields in search of disciplinary differences in the field of citation His classification of reporting verbs is not of a great difference but simpler than that of Thompson & Ye (1991) Hyland (1999) also classifies reporting verbs into two major categories “Denotation” and “Evaluation” Regarding to the denotation functions, in Hyland‟s (1999) framework reporting verbs are divided into three groups according to three types of activities they refer to However, he uses the terms “Discourse” and “Cognition” for “textual” and “mental” verb categories in Thompson & Ye‟s (1991) classification, respectively On the other side;

“Evaluation” reporting verbs are classified into: “Factive”, “Counter-factive” and Non-factive” verbs In the last category, writers have to choose among four clear

Reporting verbs

Writer

Acts

Writer Acts

Author‟s Stance

Author‟s Stance

Author‟s Interpretation

Counter-factive

Non-Author's Discourse

Author's Behavior

Status

Non

Figure 2.1: Classification of reporting verbs by Thompson & Ye (1991)

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options: positive, tentative, critical, or neutral Hyland‟s (2002) study even makes more delicate classification by exploiting the evaluative within the process categories writers made, i.e., each of the process categories of reporting verbs was sub-divided into evaluative categories Within the Findings category of Research Acts, writers can show their stance of the authors‟ result which is factive, counter-factive, or non-factive Verbs referring to procedural aspects of the writer‟s investigation are found to carry no evaluation in themselves but simply report the research procedures neutrally Cognition Acts in Hyland‟s (2002) framework, on the other hand, allows writers can attribute a particular attitude to the cited author: positive, tentative, critical, or neutral With regard to Discourse Acts verbs, Hyland‟s (2002) framework indicated that when writers use them, they allow the writers to either take responsibility for their interpretation of the information by conveying their uncertainty or assurance of the correctness of the claims reported or attribute a qualification to the cited author Discourse verbs which express writers‟ view directly are divided into doubt and assurance categories Those expressing doubt about the reported claims can be further divided into Tentative reporting

verbs (e.g postulate, hypothesize, indicate, intimate, suggest) and Critical reporting

verbs (e.g evade, exaggerate, not account, not make point) Unlike the Doubt verbs, Assurance reporting verbs serve two main purposes Firstly, they can be used to report the author position neutrally (Non-Factive Reporting verbs) Verbs such as

state, describe, discuss, report, answer, define, and summarize are used in this

regard Also, writers may use some Assurance reporting verbs (Factive Assurance)

to support their own views Verbs that fall in this category include argue, affirm,

explain, note, point out, and claim The last subcategory of Discourse Acts verbs is

the Counters This sub-category of Discourse Acts verbs allows writers to attribute the objections or reservations to the original author instead of taking responsibility

for the evaluation Examples of such verbs include deny, critique, challenge, attack,

question, warn, and rule out Classification of reporting verbs by Hyland (2002) is

given in Figure 2.2

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2.1.2 Studies focusing on tense usage of reporting verbs

Another important area of reporting verbs that has been studied by previous researchers is the tense usage of English reporting verbs, focus mainly on the past, present simple, and present perfect tense (Lackstrom, Selinker & Trimble, 1972; Oster, 1981; Malcolm, 1987; Swales, 1990; Weissberg & Buker, 1990; Shaw, 1992; Thomas & Hawes, 1997; Swales & Feak, 2004) Oster‟s (1981) It has been proved that the choice of tense is determined by various elements rather than simply by time With a small corpus of only two articles from chemical engineering, Oster (1981) analyzed tense usage associated with the nature of the claims being made about the previous literature She proposes the principal hypotheses of tense use as follows: The present tense is used primarily to refer to quantitative results of past literature that are supportive of or non-relevant to the work in the current article The Past tense is used when it refers to quantitative results of past literature that are non-supportive of some aspects of the work described in the technical article The

Reporting verbs

Research

Acts

Cognitive Acts

Discourse Acts

Non-Figure 2.2: Classification of reporting verbs by Hyland (2002)

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present perfect tense is primarily used to indicate continued discussion of some of the information in the sentence in which the present perfect tense occurs, and secondarily used to claims generality about past literature (Oster 1981, p.77)

In contrast with Oster‟s findings, some studies have shown that tense usage of reporting verbs depends on different levels of generalization of the reporting statements Lackstrom, Selinker & Trimble (1972), for instance, conclude that present tense indicates a general claim; past tense claims lack of generality and present perfect tense gives a good generalization about past events Malcolm (1987) shared similar ideas by analyzing tense choice in twenty research articles from context-independent temporal meanings and context-dependent rhetorical uses She found that generalizations tend to occur in present tense, reference to specific experiments in the past tense and reference to areas of inquiry in the present perfect tense Later, Swales (1990) points out that there is an increasing degree of generality from the past tense, to the present perfect, to the present tense, i.e., the statements in which the respective tense occurs make references to a particular study, to the area of inquiry, and finally to a broader and more general domain Thomas & Hawes (1997) suggest similar findings based on the tense choices associated with the main verbs in the reporting sentences from 11 medical research articles

Another aspect to look at tense is to take into account particular rhetorical ends the author wants to achieve with such usage Weissberg & Buker (1990) analyzed tense usage of reporting verbs in terms of prominence: The past tense is used in the findings of individual studies closely related to you own; The present tense is used

in the information prominent citations when the cited information is generally accepted as scientific fact; The present perfect tense is used in weak author prominent citations and general statements which describe the level of research activity in an area Furthermore, Weissberg & Buker (1990) indicate correlation of attitude and tense in the reported findings: Past tense is used in the findings which you believe are restricted to the specific study you are citing but not be acceptable

as true in all cases; Present tense is used in the findings which you believe are fact Later, Shaw (1992) investigated how tense of reporting verbs is used in doctoral dissertations and explores the reasons of correlation of tense and sentence function Shaw points out topicalization and topic change should be considered when analyzing the tense of reporting verbs A similar finding was obtained Swales &

of the current study

2.1.3 Studies focusing on reporting verbs used in different disciplines

The main purpose of studies on reporting verbs in this direction is to clarify how researchers in a certain discipline use reporting verbs in their research articles compared with other disciplines It has been indicated in the studies of Thompson &

Ye (1991), Hyland (1999, 2002, 2009) that the distribution of reporting verbs show broad disciplinary differences Hyland (2002) studied the use of reporting verbs in research articles in eight disciplines including molecular biology, physics, mechanical engineering, electronic engineering, philosophy, sociology, marketing, and applied linguistics with the corpus of 80 papers He found that writers in biology, marketing and physics relied on a more restricted range of items, with the most preferred five or six forms accounting for over 40% of all cases In particular, his analysis shows a fairly clear division in the process categories which again corresponds to the traditional division between hard and soft disciplines Philosophy, sociology, marketing, and applied linguistics displayed a preference for Discourse Acts verbs (averaging 61% of the total for the four disciplines), and the engineering and science papers largely employed Research-type verbs (50%) Cognition verbs were infrequent in almost all disciplines and were rarely used in the engineering and physics papers, which together contained only 6% of the total The variations in terms of choosing reporting verbs are due to variability of research performance across disciplines As Hyland (2009) proposed, authors in different fields would choose different groups of reporting verbs to refer to others‟ results or

to report their own statements The variation of the use of reporting verbs somehow implies that reporting verbs used in different contexts in academic research may carry out different communicative purposes writers intend to have In particular, Hyland (2009) indicates that writers in soft disciplines, such as social science, tend

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to use reporting verbs discuss, argue, and, suggest which shows weak attitude

towards their claims, while writers in hard disciplines, such as natural science,

prefer to use reporting verbs, such as find, to maintain a strong stance to their

is similar to Thompson & Ye‟s classification of research, mental and textual verbs Their findings showed that Real-World Verbs were the most widely used, with 52%

of total reporting verbs, while Cognition Activity Verbs were used least, only 9% This investigation also indicated that there is a correlation between choice of verb type and the function of the report in which the verb occurs However, their corpus

is relatively small and is restricted to one discipline and the modified categories of denotation are basically same as Thompson & Ye‟s (1991)

In another study on a corpus from the field of biology, Swales (2014) examined citation practices of graduate and undergraduate students from a number

of perspectives, including the distribution of integral versus parenthetical citations, the choice of reporting verbs, the effect of citing system, and the occurrence of selected features such as the use of citees‟ first names From his findings he claimed that there is no significant difference between the undergraduate and graduate papers in integral and parenthetical citations

There are also various studies on reporting verbs based on corpus in linguistics written by students as we will observe in the next section Beside that there have been a huge numbers of researches on citation on different disciplines

2.1.4 Studies focusing on reporting verbs used by different groups of authors

The study on the use of reporting verbs by postgraduate students has attracted

a lot of interest in recent years These studies aim to identify how postgraduates use reporting verbs in their theses and dissertations from which explicit instructions should be provided to help novice writers familiarize the meanings of reporting verbs within the context in academic writings Bloch (2010) aimed to create instructional materials about the role of reporting verbs in academic writing by the

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use of concordance He used a sample of articles from a leading scientific journal to create two small corpora He chose 27 common reporting verbs and a sample of 540 sentences for analyzing For each reporting verb in this sample, a randomized sample of sentences was created Each sentence in the randomized sample was classified into six categories based on syntactic form and rhetorical purpose In addition, he used writing samples from students and created the third corpus to compare the reporting verbs used by students to those used by published writers In the end, he concluded that by exposing students to authentic samples and showing the process of how an author decides to write, we can familiarize learners with language use He also used his findings to design an online database of sentences that enables teachers and material developers to form instructional materials for an academic writing course

Nanyue (2013), in her master thesis, carried out a case study with two Chinese students during their studies at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom with the aim to investigate their development of use of reporting verbs in essay writing over the course of one academic year Multiple data sources including a corpus of six assignments (three from each student), semi-structured interviews with the students, and questionnaires for a panel of two experts to judge on the level of appropriateness were collected Findings of the study indicated that the two Chinese students showed no sign of improvement over time in terms of the appropriate use

of reporting verbs In addition, the evaluative aspect of these rhetorical devices was not yet made clear to them From this result, she strongly recommended that students to be made aware of the rhetorical functions of reporting and to be sensitive to their lexical choices when introducing citations For instructors and teachers, they should provide more instruction and support on source use for non-native English students As to the curriculum designers, they should make sure that effective teaching and learning take place over the course of any English for Academic Purposes writing program

In another study, Manan & Noor (2014) used Hyland‟s (1999) framework to investigate the use of reporting verbs by Masters students in terms of frequency of the reporting verbs used, the impact(s) of the reporting verbs employed in the theses Six theses completed in 2012 were selected randomly, and they were written

by local, Malaysian students who did their Masters in the English learners program

in University Kebangsaan Malaysia Manan & Noor (2014) showed that those

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Malaysian master students were more familiar with the reporting verbs from the research acts category, as compared to cognition acts and discourse acts Their findings also revealed that the verbs found from the research acts category are the most widely used, while states from the discourse acts category are the most frequently repeated Based on their findings, they suggested that the Masters students should be equipped with the knowledge of using reporting verbs in a Research Methodology course

Berhail (2017) in her master theses addressed how reporting verbs are used in Literature Reviews of master thesis written by postgraduates of Language Sciences and Anglo-American Studies in the Department of English in Larbi Ben M‟hidi University, Algeria The corpus consists of 10 master theses that were selected from both streams at the department of English the University of Oum El Bouaghi Reporting verbs were collected and tallied using AntConc and SPSS software After that, they were classified using Hyland‟s (2002) classification of reporting verbs Her analysis has revealed that Language Sciences and Anglo-American Studies students tend to use different types of reporting verbs which can be addressed to the nature of their fields However, most of the verbs used belong to the same category according to Hyland‟s (2002) classification Discourse Acts verbs were prominent, followed by Cognition Acts verbs and Research Acts verbs The investigation also shows that these students‟ use of limited number of reporting verbs In addition to that, it was found that, in terms of reporting verbs‟ evaluative potential, students limited themselves to non-factive verbs Their mistakes and non-idiomatic expressions used in reporting previous studies could reflect their deficit of vocabulary and their low level of language proficiency as indicated by Hyland (2002)

Amrullah, Munir & Suharsono (2017) recently investigated the rhetorical functions of reporting verbs employed in the author prominent citations of research papers written by graduate students Different from the work of Manan & Noor (2014), the authors showed that the students tended to use reporting verbs in discourse act category instead of research act and cognitive act categories Moreover, the students‟ problems were found on the misuses verb choice, tense choice, and syntactic pattern of the reported sentences, in particular the overuse and misuse the verb „state‟ without fully understanding its functional meaning within

2.1.5 Studies focusing on comparisons in the use of reporting verbs by English native and non-native English authors

The main focus in this direction is the comparison in using reporting verbs by native English writers and non-native English writers from which suggestion is provided to non-native English writers to improve their academic writing In a study

by Jafarigohar & Mohammadkhani (2015), the authors compared differences in using reporting verbs in applied linguistics research articles written by non-native English writers and their native counterparts The findings showed significant differences in the choices writers made in using reporting verbs, in particular in the higher use of direct quotations by native writers

In a similar setting, Yeganeha & Boghayeri (2015) conducted an investigation

on the frequency and function of reporting verbs in research articles written by native Persian and English native speakers In their study, Introduction and Literature Review sections of 60 research articles, 30 by native English writers published in international journal and 30 by Persian published in national journals, were selected and analyzed The results indicated that reporting clauses with a that-clause complement in reporting others‟ research were considerably used Although, there are some evidences of differences in grammatical subject and verb choice, the most frequently occurring pattern is common to the two corpora: an integral citation

Yilmaz & Ozdem Erturk (2017) have conducted a study comparing native Turkish and native English writers on the use of reporting verbs in terms of frequencies, functional and positional differences, and syntactic patterning of the first three overused reporting verbs They used two corpora of 160 English teaching

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language research articles published in peer-reviewed, international journals in the field of language teaching Out of these 160 research articles, 80 of them were written by Turkish researchers, and the other 80 articles were written by their native English counterparts Their findings indicated that some reporting verbs, like revealed, indicated and observed are overused by non-native researchers Also, there are some differences in the use of reporting verbs in terms of syntactic patterning between the two corpora

2.1.6 Studies focusing on reporting verbs in different languages in a comparison with English

Studies in this direction focus on investigating similarities and differences in using reporting verbs between English writers and writers who speak a different language in their mother tongues in different aspects such as integral-ness & prominence, reporting forms, categories and tense of reporting verbs, and functions

of reporting We would like to point out that the current study follows this trend but

in a different setting

Zhang (2008) studied the reporting verbs of citations in eight disciplines (social sciences: psychology, philosophy, economics, history; and physical sciences: biology, physics, electronic engineering, chemistry) including 80 master‟s theses among which 40 are Chinese theses and 40 are English theses This study investigates similarities and differences of reporting between Chinese theses by native-speakers-of-Chinese and English theses by native-speakers-of-English from four aspects: integral-ness & prominence, reporting forms, categories and tense of reporting verbs, and functions of reporting She found that English writers use more reporting statements than Chinese writers, including integral citations and non-integral citations Summary and generalization are used most frequently in both Chinese data and English data in five reporting forms English writers use more reporting statements in each reporting form Textual and research verbs are employed more frequently in English corpus than in Chinese corpus, but mental verbs occur in Chinese corpus more frequently Tense of reporting verbs in Chinese

is more completed than those in English Three reporting functions are identified in Chinese and English data, among which background is used most frequently while support is least used

In Chapter seven of her doctoral dissertation Bašić studied reporting verbs used in research articles in English and Croatian Reporting verbs in the texts of the

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source research articles in English and Croatian are analyzed as evidential, as points

of access to insight into various ways of expressing different kinds of evidential meanings in the texts of research articles The corpus consists of 165 research articles (95 in English and 70 in Croatian) in both “hard” and “soft” disciplines including computer engineering, mechanical engineering, physics, chemistry, biomedicine, psychology, sociology, linguistics, and literature The aim of the analysis was to investigate how writers of research articles linguistically signal the status of the knowledge they present in their utterances, especially how they signal the evidence on which they base their claims By looking at the discourse function

of reports in a particular utterance, Bašić attempted to find out the relation between the lexical meanings of the particular reporting verbs and their evidential implications expressed by using these verbs in particular contexts Also, the findings point to the differences in the frequency of use of particular verbs

2.1.7 Studies on reporting verbs in Vietnamese setting

In Vietnam, some scholars have become interested in studying citation and reporting verbs in recent years Nguyen & Pramoolsook (2015a) conducted a research on reporting verbs used in Literature Review of 24 master‟s theses written

by Vietnamese postgraduates By employing Hyland‟s (2002) classification of reporting verbs, in terms of their denotation and evaluation, their studies indicated that Discourse acts were the most prominent, followed by Research acts and Cognition acts Regarding the evaluative potentials of reporting verbs, and the tense and voice uses, the finding reveals that this group of Vietnamese students tended to use reporting verbs randomly without being aware of their rhetorical functions for achieving the communicative purposes of Literature Review chapters Using the same corpus together with semi-structured interviews, in a further study, Nguyen (2017) considers reporting verbs in each chapter of those theses She found that these students tended to use using reporting verbs purposely to describe the research process in each chapter However, there was a limited number of reporting verbs used in the whole thesis corpus, and these writers‟ inappropriate use of reporting verbs in terms of their evaluative potentials for evaluating the cited claims Nguyen

& Pramoolsook (2015b) also conducted studies on citation process based on those theses These findings suggest that it is necessary to teach students the various functions and the rhetorical effects that reporting verbs can have on their academic writing

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Beside a series of papers by Nguyen & Pramoolsook (2015a, 2015b, 2016) and Nguyen (2014, 2017), in her master thesis, Hoang (2018) investigates similarities and differences of using reporting verbs between an English novel “The Lost Symbol” and its Vietnamese translated version from four signal functions: neutral reporting, showing the speaker‟s purpose, showing the manner of speaking and indicating how the message fits in In this thesis, 113 verbs in Vietnamese translation and 80 verbs in English novel are collected Her study shows that Vietnamese corpus uses fewer neutral reporting verbs than native speakers of English One interesting feature is that the verb say and its corresponding word in

Vietnamese language nói are mostly used in both corpora but the frequency of occurrence of nói is half of say (nói appears 417 times and say 702 times) She also

found that in Vietnamese version translator tends to use more reporting verbs to describe the aim of the speaker than in English version In spite of unequal frequency of occurrence of the reporting verbs used, her study has shown that all the signal functions examined in English original novel are reflected sufficiently in Vietnamese translated version

2.2 Reporting verbs

2.2.1 Definition of reporting

According to Thomas & Hawes (1994) reports are the metalinguistic representation of an idea from another source More specifically, they refer to the use of language in one situation, the current situation, to represent the way language (some idea, thought, or speech utterance) was used in a previous situation Adding

to this point of view, Thompson (1996) claimed that reports usually consist of two factors: the reporting signal and the message The reporting signal is the part of the report which shows that you are reporting someone else‟s words rather than expressing your own ideas The message is the part which shows what was said or written Reporting signals are criteria in identifying a report structure They are not only reporting verbs, but also other elements such as reporting nouns, reporting adjectives, and reporting adjuncts including reporting adverbs, prepositional phrase, and subordinative finite clause

In academic writing it is often necessary to refer to the research of others and

to report on their findings In this context, Thomas & Hawes (1994) define reporting

as

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The attribution of propositional content of a source outside the author of the article in the current situation, and the marking of this by presence of any of a number of signals of attribution‟ (p.129)

Beside above mentioned signals, one highlighted attribution feature of reports

in academic writing is citation Citation is a kind of formal and explicit reference to the previous works in academic writing There has been the distinction between integral and non-integral structures, the former referring to cases where the name of the cited author occurs in the citing sentence, and the latter to where the author appears in parenthesis or is referred to by superscript numbers It is worth to note that although most citations are reporting in academic writing and citation are not identical Consider the example: Some scholars have found that learning strategies are crucial in second language learning This sentence is a reporting statement since

it states a general trend in one area, but it is not a citation

There are significant differences between reporting in academic writing and reported speech Reporting in academic writing refers to academic authors making reference to previous works, including ideas, research outcomes or findings, and research activities of previous research authors What is reported in academic writing can be referred to as a single study, as groups of studies, or as general level and trends of research Reported speech refers to the account of the original speech event and it is used to report what an original speaker actually says Reported speech is studied in relation to both spoken discourse and written discourse while reporting in academic writing is studied in relation to written text Concerning the function of reporting, reporting in academic writing serves a variety of purposes such as to locate the author‟s work in the larger context; to describe what has been done to indicate what has not been done in order to create a new research space; to define a specific context of knowledge or problem or to give statements greater authority Reported speech reflects the system and nature of communication, social dynamics and human cognition, and intrinsically manifests the dialogic nature of language

In addition to the face value of making attributions to previous research, reporting has other functions as well The most influential work of reporting in academic writing perhaps is the paper of Swales (1990) who investigated the 158 introductions of research articles in diverse fields in which the incorporation of sources frequently occurs After that, regarding the importance of report and

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academic writing conventions, research in this field has flourished focusing on either reporting process in general or particular reporting signals such as citation or reporting verbs as we have seen some of them in the previous section Reporting to prior research is almost a distinguishing feature of the academic research that researchers need for expressing their own stance and establishing the credibility of their claims in an article Hyland (2002) argued that its importance in academic discourse lies in providing an appropriate context of persuasion, demonstrating how the current work builds on and reworks past utterances to establish inter-textual links to the wider discipline In other word, for its success, academic writing depends on situating current work in a larger disciplinary narrative Without such links academics could neither justify their arguments by connecting their research activities to significant work in the field, nor use this disciplinary knowledge to establish the novelty of their position

2.2.2 Reporting verbs in academic writing

In view of the complexity of reporting and the central role it plays in academic writing, this section discusses the most clear signal of reporting, i.e., reporting verbs Roughly speaking, a reporting verb is a verb belonging to a class of verbs conveying the action of speaking and used with both direct and reported speech Reporting verbs are used to communicate information from other sources, such as books, surveys, and articles The researcher should always use such information to support what he or she wants to convey when ideas of another author or researcher are being discussed There are many reporting verbs and each of them has a distinct

or slight different meaning Reporting verbs also differ in terms of their strength Consider the following examples

Smith (2016) assumes that reporting verbs have different strengths

Smith (2016) insists that reporting verbs have different strengths

Although both verbs have the same general meaning, namely believe, the verb assume is quite weak, while the verb insist is much stronger The second verb most closely matches the information above and how it is presented, i.e as a fact, and is therefore more accurate than the first one So using the adequate words depends, as much as anything, on interpreting correctly the author‟s claims that are being analyzed That explains why reporting verbs are difficult to master even for native speakers, but when used correctly, they undoubtedly give a greater quality to their writing

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The use of a reporting verb in academic discourse is one of the most explicit ways of attributing content to another source, and represents a significant rhetorical choice There have been many authors addressed the rhetorical function of reporting verbs in academic writing Hyland (1999, 2002), Bloch (2010) to mention just a few According to the Greek philosopher Aristotle, rhetoric is the art of using language which speaker or writer utilizes to persuade the audience or readers that his/her claims are valid Thus, rhetoric is an appropriate instrument for authors to influence their readers about their point of view Bloch (2010) considered rhetorical terms in academic writing as a process of developing an argument to support the researcher‟s claims Based on this way of thinking, the rhetorical impact of a paper is related with the connections that authors make either for their own claims or other authors‟ claim contributing to the building up of author‟s argument Therefore, reporting verbs can be seen as rhetorical attributions that are used to help author‟s claims and

to influence readers that authors‟ claims are reasonable and significant

2.3 Patterns and denotation functions of reporting verbs

2.3.1 Integral and non-integral citation patterns

Following Thompson & Tribble‟s (2001: p 95-96) classification, reporting verbs are used both integral and non-integral citation patterns In the integral citation the name of the cited author is included in the sentence which foregrounds the cited author, and in non-integral citation the name of the cited author is provided

in brackets, which places emphasis on the content Patterns in integral citation consists two structures:

 Human subject (cited author) followed by a reporting verb In this form, a noun group referring to the cited author functions as the subject of the reporting verb or as the agent in a passive construction

 Non-human subject (research noun + cited author) followed by a reporting verb The subject of the reporting verb in this structure is a noun group whose head is a research noun (e.g., findings) and where the cited author is typically a modifier

Patterns in non-integral citation contain three main sub-patterns

 General inanimate reference (discourse/research noun with a general reference) followed by a reporting verb (active /passive) The discourse noun

is used to refer to several sources and the citation in brackets provides examples of these sources

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 General animate reference (plural reference to cited authors) followed by a reporting verb A plural animated noun (cited authors, researchers) is the head of a noun phrase that functions as the subject of the reporting verb

 Reporting verb in the passive voice or introductory „it‟ as subject of reporting in the passive voice (e.g., it has been reported that)

These patterns reflect different degrees of cited authors‟ visibility as participants in the reporting process While assigning the cited author the subject position (pattern cited author followed by a reporting verb) makes the cited author more prominent and visible, the last pattern deflects attention from the cited author

2.3.2 Denotation functions of reporting verbs

Reporting verbs are more than just a list of vocabulary for authors to choose from without any consideration Choosing the „right‟ reporting verb depends on factors: what the cited author is doing, the extent to which authors agree with the cited author Thomas & Hawes (1994) and Hyland (1999, 2002) have provided an interesting analysis of the relationships between reporting verbs and evaluation, and their categorization emphasizes the important distinction between the position of the reporting author and the source author Hyland‟s (1999) framework is similar to that

of Thomas & Hawes (1994) but it is simpler As Hyland argues, it still retains the dynamic relationship between the verb choice and the rhetorical function as well as attribution of stance revealed from such a choice In this section we review denotation of reporting verbs in Hyland‟s (1999) framework

Denotation function of reporting verbs simply interprets the activities the cited author was doing such as finding, doing, or thinking, showing Hyland (1999) categorized reporting verbs into three types, depending on the kind of activity they refer to: Research Acts, Cognition Acts and Discourse Acts verbs Research Acts verbs include verbs that indicate experimental activity carried out in the real world Such verbs generally occur in statements or procedures Table 2.1 shows a list of the common verbs in this category

Table 2.1: Common reporting verbs in Research Acts category

Table 2.2: Common reporting verbs in Cognition Acts category

Table 2.3: Common reporting verbs in Discourse Acts category