How Citation Is Signaled: A Corpus-Based Study on Reporting Verbs in Chinese Academic Papers

Abstract

Reporting verbs (RVs) are an important language resource for academic writing, and using such verbs is a language feature of academic articles. Through investigating 30 research articles in the three disciplines of economics, politics, and linguistics, this paper examines the forms and sentence patterns, functions and classification, and frequency distribution of Chinese RVs. In addition, a comparison is made between Chinese RVs and English RVs. The study has the following findings: (1) Chinese RVs are characterized by four forms, five basic sentence patterns, and three categories, i.e., research verbs, discourse verbs, and cognition verbs; (2) the function of RVs reflects the attention of a referrer to the research of a referee and shows the referrer’s evaluation attitudes; (3) regarding the distribution of RVs, Chinese writers use RVs less frequently than English writers. In addition, Chinese articles have more research verbs than English, which reflects that Chinese writers are more likely to cite other people’s research behaviours and report their research results instead of evaluating them. The findings on RVs in this study can not only provide support for Chinese academic writing, but also facilitate the exploration, application, and education of Chinese for Academic Purposes.