Evaluative functions of reporting verbs in academic writing

Abstract

Writers make use of reporting verbs in making claims when citing the works of other authors. The study explores the evaluative functions of Reporting Verbs (RVs) in the Literature Review (LR) sections of the masters theses written by students from the University of Education, Winneba. Using the Antconc concordance software and Hyland’s (2002) taxonomy of RVs as the analytical framework. A corpus of 36 LR sections of master theses were purposely selected from six disciplines for the study. In all there were 2449 tokens of reporting verbs in different forms from the 102 RVs extracted. The three most common RVs that occurred in the study are: find, conduct and state verbs. The analysis reveals that denotatively, the Discourse Acts category of RVs were employed the most (52.8%) followed by the Research Acts (42%) and then the Cognitive Acts (5.6%). Evaluatively, the discourse act assurance factive verb was the most used as against non factive and counter/critical verbs. In terms of tense, the present simple tense(54%) was the preferred tense by the students. It was followed by the past simple(40.3%) and the present perfect tense (5.5%). The analysis reveals that the students used more of the active voices (92.7%) as against (7.3%) of the passive voice. Based on the findings, this study recommends the explicit teaching of reporting verbs and their evaluative functions in the academic writing (research methods) class to expose students to the variety of RVs and how to use them. The study further contributes to postgraduate pedagogy and citation practices and serves as a fertile resource for further research.