Intentional function and frequency of reporting verbs across six disciplines: A cluster analysis

Academic writers can convey their attitudes and opinions, or stance, through carefully chosen reporting verbs, which introduce and cite sources while expressing author perspectives. Since reporting verbs reflect different authorial intentions, they can be categorized into different stance acts. Howe...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:International Journal of English for Academic Purposes: Research and Practice 2024-03, Vol.4 (1), p.47-71
Main Authors: Rawlins, Jacob D., Eckstein, Grant, Hanks, Elizabeth, Lester, Emily W., Wilde, Lauryn, Bartholomew, Ryan
Format: Article
Language:English
Citations: Items that this one cites
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Academic writers can convey their attitudes and opinions, or stance, through carefully chosen reporting verbs, which introduce and cite sources while expressing author perspectives. Since reporting verbs reflect different authorial intentions, they can be categorized into different stance acts. However, there is limited research on how reporting verb stance varies across disciplines. In this study, we analysed the stance of reporting verbs in the background sections of 270 academic articles from six disciplines in the Academic Journal Registers Corpus (AJRC) (Gray, 2011). Two cluster analyses yielded three clusters of reporting verb patterns based on act type, and five clusters based on stance type. The distribution of these clusters varied across disciplines, with applied linguistics and history as well as physics and political science showing similar patterns. This article was published open access under a CC BY licence: https://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0.
ISSN:2634-4610
2634-4610
DOI:10.3828/ijeap.2024.4