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Discourse Analysis Project: Junyu Wu 8702100903
A Corpus Study of the Use of Reporting Verbs as Rhetoric in Academic Papers across
Disciplines
Introduction:
It is well known that in academic writing, it will often be necessary to refer to the research of
others and to report on their findings. The appropriate choice of a reporting verb in the
citation of one’s own claims or the claims of others has been increasingly viewed as an
important part in academic writing. However, it is true that there are also major differences in
the ways writers use reporting verbs, as Hyland proposed, writers in different fields would
choose different sets of reporting verbs referring others’ literatures or reporting their own
statements (Hyland 2009: 11). 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 have. According to this way of thinking, reporting verbs in
academic papers might be seen as rhetoric instruments that are used to support writers’ claims
and to convince readers that writers’ claims are significant and justifiable. The purpose of the
study is to examine the use of reporting verbs in research papers of three disciplines: BIO
(Biology), LIN (Applied Linguistics), and PHI (Philosophy), understanding the use of
reporting verbs in particular rhetorical contexts across disciplines. The following research
questions will be posed:
What are the differences of the use of reporting verbs in research papers in three disciplines,
BIO, LIN and PHI?
How reporting verbs are used in particular rhetorical contexts in those disciplines?
The paper begins with a background section that describes Ädel and Hyland’s previous
researches of most common reporting verbs used across disciplines. Details are then given of
Bloch’s previous research on the categories reflecting distinctions writers make in choosing a
reporting verb.
Background:
This section presents a few significant ideas and studies that this analysis builds on. Before
introducing Ädel and Hyland’s previous researches, a brief description of reporting verbs will
be introduced.
In Bloch’s article (2010), he states that ‘according to Hyland, reporting verbs are one of a
number of grammatical devices writers need for expressing their own stance in an academic
paper’ (220). Again, Bloch (2010) explains that reporting verbs can be used to both report

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writers’ own ideas or to show the attitude writers have towards others’ claims. Thus, it seems
that the lexical and syntactic decisions regarding the choice of reporting verbs can emerge
from within this rhetorical context (220).
In Ädel’s previous research (2006), she reports the results of a corpus investigation of the
attribution in published academic writing in ten disciplines (271). She mentions that the
typical attribution type is a verbal structure, involving a reporting verb, so she posits a
measurement of most common reporting verbs used in attribution across disciplines (Ädel
2006: 274), the table shows most common reporting verbs used in the case of attribution in
five disciplines: BIO, ECO, LIN, PSY and PHI. At the end of the article, Ädel (2006)
postulates an interesting result that ‘reporting verbs seem to be used rather idiosyncratically in
each discipline and it is hard to find clear patterns across the hard-soft discipline divide. A
large number of the verbs, like show (biology, economics, psychology) and describe (biology,
linguistics, nursing, sociology), pattern in seemingly random ways’ (275).
Table 1: Most common reporting verbs used in attribution across disciplines
Disc Top-ranking verbs (starting with most frequent)
BIO
ECO
LIN
PHI
PSY
note, suggest, propose, argue, find, cite, describe, observe, show
find, show, argue, identify, point out, propose, present, examine
argue, say, claim, point out, describe, discuss, suggest, state, propose, mention
argue, claim, say, note, state, think, suggest, believe, mean, conclude
find, suggest, argue, use, examine, point out, discuss, show, state, conclude
However, Hyland’s research (2009) demonstrates different points of view of reporting verbs.
He finds that there are major differences in the use of reporting verbs in different fields, with
results suggesting that ‘writers in different fields draw on very different sets of reporting
verbs to refer to their literature (Hyland 2009: 11). The example given by Hyland shows that
soft disciplines largely use verbs such as discuss, argue and suggest, referring writing
activities, while hard disciplines generally use verbs such as such as show, find and report
which refer to writing activities, (Hyland 11), as can be seen in the following table:
Table 2: Most frequent reporting verbs.
‘Soft’ Disciplines ‘Hard’ Disciplines
Philosophy: say, suggest, argue, claim Biology: describe, find, report, show, analyze
Sociology: argue, suggest, describe, discuss Elec Eng: show, propose, report, describe
Applied Ling: suggest, argue, show, explain, indicate Mech Eng: show, report, describe,

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discuss
Marketing: suggest, argue, demonstrate, propose Physics: develop, report, study
As mentioned above, it is interesting to think of the role of reporting verbs in academic
discourse. Bloch (2010) gives ideas that many recent perspectives on academic research argue
that the traditional views of writing up research might be out of date (222). By this, it means
that the “natural” outcome of scientific research might not be enough for today’s academic
research, and writers’ claims do not only need to be clearly and concisely situated within the
previous research (Bloch 2010: 222). Rhetorical instruments need to be used in academic
research in order to make claims believable and to convince the readers that their claims are
justifiable and significant (Bloch 2010:222). Again, Bloch (2010) mentions that ‘according to
Hunston & Thompson, the rhetorical impact of a paper often rests on the connections that
writers make between their own claims and the claims of others’ (223). In order to publish
their research, writers must therefore evaluate the strength of their claims and references to
others’ claims (Bloch 2010: 223). Thus, Bloch (2010)concludes that ‘the choice of reporting
verbs can require a great deal of exactness in order to establish the credibility of both the
writer and the claims so that there is a greater likelihood that the reader will accept the
position the writer is taking’(223).
In Bloch’s research (2010), he chooses six categories to reflect the distinctions writers make
in choosing a reporting verb. The purpose of his study is to describe the various uses of
reporting verbs in different contexts in students’ academic papers in order to help non-native
students to figure out how to use reporting verbs correctly in different rhetorical contexts. Six
categories are: integral/nointegral, informative/descriptive, writer/author,
positive/negative/unclear, and strong/weak/moderate. Bloch (2010) explains that ‘according
to Swales citations including the name of author in the sentences, which are referred to as
integral, and those with the name of author outside of the sentence, which are called
nonintegral’ (231); ‘descriptive type of sentences referring to sentences that provide a general
overview of the research’ (Bloch 2010: 232), while ‘informative sentences present a claim or
piece of information; strong, weak or moderate reflect the degree of strength of attitude
towards claim’ (Bloch 2010:234).
Material:

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The present study use MICUSP, the Michigan Corpus of Upper-level Student Papers which is
a new corpus of student writing in English. Ädel (2006) also uses this corpus in her research.
She introduces that ‘MICUSP consists of A-grade writing by senior undergraduate and
graduate students in the US (271). ‘The corpus is balanced with respect to ten different
disciplines, including year of study of the writers ranging from fourth year undergraduate to
third year graduate, also, with respect to native and non-native speaker status’ (Ädel 2006:
271). Moreover, there are also divisions of writing genres in the corpus, such as argument
essays, creating writing, report, and research papers. The present study looks at research
papers written by graduate students across three disciplines BIO, LIN and PHI. Therefore, the
corpus is considered a useful tool in the research.
Methodology:
The study applies the methodology of corpus linguistics, a particular methodology which is
used to test authentic data. A corpus can be broadly defined as ‘a collection of texts which is
stored on some kind of digital medium and used by linguists to retrieve linguistic items for
research or by lexicographers for dictionary-making” (Lindquist 2009: 3). It is true that
corpus linguistics can be used to explore almost any area of linguistics research (McEenry,
Xiao & Tono 2006: 16). Needless to say, studying actual and authentic instances of language
use from a corpus gives researchers the most reliable evidence for the claims they make about
language.
In the first section of the experiment, it will measure the frequencies of occurrence of most
common reporting verbs collected in Ädel and Hyland’s previous researches in the Michigan
Corpus of Upper-level Student Papers, focusing on research papers of graduate students
across three disciplines BIO, LIN and PHI. The purpose of this section is to demonstrate the
most common reporting verbs used in graduate students’ research papers across three
disciplines. Next, by looking at concordance lines of each reporting verbs, each concordance
line will be coded into three categories integral/nointegral, informative/descriptive, and
strong/weak/moderate. Then, an analysis of those categories will be presented in the second
section of my research, answering why those reporting verbs were chosen and which kind of
purposes they may function in research papers across three disciplines.
Results and Discussion:

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Table 3 shows the most common reporting verbs used in both Ädel and Hyland’s previous
researches.
Disciplines The most frequent used reporting verbs
BIO
LIN
PHI
note, suggest, propose, argue, find, cite, describe, observe, show, analyze
argue, say, claim, point out, describe, discuss, suggest, state, propose,
mention, explain, indicate
argue, claim, say, note, state, think, suggest, believe, mean, conclude
It needs to be noted that the present study focuses on analyzing reporting verbs used in
research papers of graduate students with particular mentions of rhetorical contexts rather
than looking at all the students’ papers as Ädel did in her research. In addition, the present
study is also interested in looking at the differences of the use of reporting verbs across
disciplines. Therefore, in the present study, it is necessary to test all the reporting verbs shown
in Table 3 across three disciplines to see the differences of the use of reporting verbs in
different fields also to find similarities or differences compared with Ädel’s results. Some
simple verbs such as state and cite are excluded, as they are used with a very low frequency to
provide any reliable numbers.
Table 4: The most common reporting verbs used in graduate students’ research papers
There is great variation in the use of reporting verbs in MICUSP, focusing on graduate
students’ research papers. It can be seen that some reporting verbs occur on the list for only
one discipline, for example, Say, claim, and believe are somehow unique to the philosophy list.
Show is important in biology and in linguistics. It is interesting to view that think is on the
linguistics and philosophy lists only. Overall, it is likely that philosophy has a number of
prototypical verba dicendi than other disciplines; the finding is somewhat similar with Ädel’s
results. In the “hard” science, the verbs analyze and propose make it onto the biology list.
However, as Ädel proposed in her results, it seems true that it is hard to find clear patterns
across disciplines: some verbs such as show, explain and find are used across three disciplines.
Disciplines Top ranking verbs(starting with most frequent)
BIO show, explain, suggest, indicate, propose, analyze, find
LIN show, find, present, explain, indicate, note, think
PHI say, think, claim, believe, argue, explain, find

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The only evidence is that reporting verbs used on philosophy list are somewhat different
compared with other disciplines.
Since the purpose of this research is to demonstrate the use of reporting verbs in particular
rhetorical contexts across disciplines, it is necessary to analyze concordance lines in MICUSP
for testing possible differences about the use of each reporting verbs. The analysis presented
here is intended to describe the various use of reporting verbs in the rhetorical contexts across
three disciplines. Three categories: integral/nonintegral, informative/descriptive, and
strong/weak/moderate were chosen to reflect distinctions writers make in choosing a reporting
verb. The number of examples for each category in each discipline is shown in tables 6-8.
Table 6: Frequencies for each category by word in biology
Categories show explain suggest indicate propose analyze find
Frequency 11 8 7 7 4 3 3
integral 0 0 1 0 1 0 0
non
integral
0 1 3 0 4 1 1
descriptive 5 0 0 5 2 3 2
informative 6 8 7 2 2 0 1
Strong 11 4 3 7 1 2 2
weak 0 4 4 0 3 1 1
In biology, there is a fact that reporting verbs are used with a low frequency in the first
category integral/nonintegral. To be more specific, reporting verbs are used with a higher
frequency in nonintegral sentences compared with those in integral sentences, which seems to
indicate that writers intend to avoid showing a specific reference to the authors, as in the
examples (1-2), there is no reference to any specific research paper although this research will
be discussed in more detail afterwards, which somehow reflects that writers may show less
emphasis on the authorship of the claim.
1. This has led some to propose a Cretaceous origin of Cichlidae before the break-
up of Gondwana (Sparks 2001; Stiassny 1991).
2. Other result suggests a strong correlation between degree centrality (the same as node
degree) and gene essentiality (Jeong, Mason et al. 2001).
It can be noted that tentative verbs such as suggest are chosen to describe other authors’
claims, implying that writers may not fully agree with others’ claims, as Bloch(2010)
proposed, the use of verbs such as suggest to refer to others’ claims also implies that writers
may still not agree with the claim (232). In example (2), since writer presents other authors’
claims by using suggest, his or her attitude towards the claim will most likely to be negative.

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Again, in (1), the use of propose only considers the claim to be a suggestion rather than a fact
as in (3).
In addition, it is important to note that reporting verbs are used with a high frequency in
informative sentences, presenting a claim or a piece of information, also, there is a high
frequency in strong strength of attitude towards claims, for instance:
3. A species of the group under study is found on either side of a supposed barrier
to dispersal (4) molecular clocks or sequence divergence times reliably show
that lineages have diverged after the particular vicariant events under study.
4. The difference is very significant (2 by 2 contingency test, p < 0.0001) which
strongly suggest the correspondence between protein complex and topological
modules.
It is interesting to view that unlike other hard sciences, in biology, writers do not choose very
strong verbs such as prove to report their claims to readers instead they seems to place
themselves in a neutral position to present their results, using neutral verbs show or even a
tentative verb suggest. However, it is evident that they do have a very strong degree of
strength of their commitment to the claims. In the examples (3-4), they boost their claims by
using adverbs such as reliably and strongly, which implies that they efficiently express their
strong degree of strength of their commitment to the claims by using adverbs to provide
additional support evidence.
There are a number of examples are found in the informative group containing the word
explain. Explain is mostly used to show results and the data, such as
5. Dispersal will be the favored mechanism to explain a disjunct distribution when
falsifiers of vicariance - by adding assumptions to a vicariance hypothesis - make
dispersal a more parsimonious alternative.
Compared with philosophy, it is obvious that in biology, reporting verbs are used with a
higher frequency in descriptive sentences. Neutral verbs such as indicate are chosen to
describe the general idea of research or to explain methodology, for example:
6. Ranges marked with blue bars indicate forelimb-dominated swimmers, while
red bars indicate hind limb-dominated swimmers.
There is no information given in example (6) since writers only describe visual images and
report what they represent in the research. However, it still can be interpreted that in “hard”
sciences such as biology, writers prefer to give more effective descriptions for their

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experiments including enough details since detailed explanations of the research method and
results are somehow significant to support their claims and to satisfy readers’ curiosity.
Table 7: Frequencies for each category by word in linguistics
Categories show find present explain indicate note think
Frequency 18 16 9 9 7 7 7
integral 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
Non
integral
0 0 1 0 0 0 0
descriptive 0 6 7 0 6 0 1
informative 18 10 2 9 1 7 6
strong 18 6 6 3 6 7 7
weak 0 10 3 6 1 0 0
In linguistics, it is obvious that the most frequent used reporting verbs are applied with a very
low frequency in the first category integral/nonintegral. There is almost no information given
in the table since only present is used once in nonintegral sentences. However, it cannot be
concluded that in linguistics, writers do not use others’ references. The speculation to explain
this is that graduate students may pay more attentions on their claims. Thus, reporting verbs
such as state and claim that are generally used to refer to others’ literatures are rarely put into
use. On the other hand, Dahlia Remler, a professor at the school of public affairs, Baruch
College points out that many academic articles are never cited, her finding is that “12% of
medicine articles are not cited, compared to about 82% for the humanities. It’s 27% for
natural sciences and 32% for social sciences (cite)” (Dahlia no page).
Furthermore, reporting verbs are used with a high frequency in informative sentences,
reporting writers’ claims. Again, like in biology, in linguistics, it seems that writers show their
strong strength to their claims by using adverbs such as clearly, as can be seen in example (7):
7. The data clearly show that stressed syllables are roughly 10-30% longer than
their unstressed counterparts.
It can be realized that writers also use other linguistic items as additional support evidence,
for example,
8. An example or two will suffice to show why an n-gram model will always fail on
certain types of entailment pairs.
Another interesting finding is that in linguistics, even though writers use reporting verbs such
as find with a high frequency in informative sentences to present their aims. However, find is
used with a high frequency in weak strength of attitude towards claims: hedging is often
placed in front of the reporting verb find. By this, Bloch (2010) explains that according to

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Hyland, ‘hedging is used to express the strength of agreement or disagreement with the claim
or, in the case of the writer's own claims, the certainty of the claim itself’ (238). Thus, the
examples (9-10) indicate that writers in linguistics seem to show a weak degree of strength of
their commitments to the aims.
9. This paper is an attempt to find that duration measurements of the independent
consonants (stop closure duration, stop aspiration duration, and frication
duration) will all be shortened.
10. I expect to find that the frication frequency for the affricate [ ] is the same
frequency as in [ ], and similarly for [ ] and [ ].
In linguistics, explain is also used with a high frequency in the informative group. However,
explain is widely used to show the consequences of a piece of data, as Bloch stated, for
instance,
11. These measurements explain why I transcribed the two vowels differently when
recording them, even though they should both be realizations of the final /a/ of a
feminine noun or vowel.
The different uses of the verb explain in linguistics and in biology seem to reflect different
attitude towards the data and results across two disciplines. It seems that in linguistics, writers
need more space to explain the consequences of the data, which means that the results in
linguistics’ articles are not that obvious to find, so writers have to give more explanations in
order to help readers figure out the purpose writers try to carry out, while in biology, writers
seem to report their results more straightforward without a lot of interpretations and
explanations.
Table 8: Frequencies for each category by word in philosophy
Categories say think claim believe argue explain find
Frequency 10 7 6 4 3 2 2
integral 0 0 2 0 0 0 0
Non
integral
1 0 0 0 0 0 0
descriptive 4 0 0 0 0 0 1
informative 6 7 6 4 3 2 2
strong 4 4 1 0 1 1 2
weak 6 3 5 4 2 1 0
In philosophy, the first observation is that the most common reporting verbs are also used
with a very low frequency in the category integral/ nonintegral. Dahlia’s claim of the use of
citations in academic papers would be considered as a reason to explain this phenomenon.

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As mentioned above, compared with the other two disciplines, in philosophy, reporting verbs
are used with a low frequency in descriptive sentences, but with a high frequency in
informative sentences, which implies that in philosophy, writers probably produce a large
number of personal interpretations, claims or information rather than just simply describing
the general idea of research. Further, as Ädel postulated in her research, there are a number of
basic verba dicendi in research papers of philology, for example, a speaking/ mental verb say
is used with the highest frequency on the list, which seems to illustrate that writers contribute
more mental activities rather than actual evident in research papers, as in (12)
12. As for (iv), suffice it to say that when a speaker asserts something it is her
intention to get the hearer to believe in what is asserted (e.g. a proposition) and
thus, to take the actual world as being in that way.
The example reflects that in philology, although writers prefer to use speaking/mental verbs
such as say, believe and think to claim their mental phenomena or thoughts, without actual
evidence to support, they still try to show a strong degree of strength of their commitments to
the claims by placing a transitive verb suffice in front of say.
Last but not least, it can be found that most of the common reporting verbs in philology are
used with a high frequency in weak attitude towards claims, such as:
13. One way to eliminate this problem would be to claim that nothing can be, at the
same time, contingently true and known a priori (the same for the necessary a
posteriori). Knowledge and truth go together in only one way, if it is necessary it
must be a priori, if it is a posteriori it must be contingent.
14. It might then argue that it is not the sentence but the whole of A which is
contingent and a priori. This cannot be the truth in question, for several reasons.
Two strong reporting verbs claim and argue are chosen to demonstrate writers’ claims.
However, the choice of argue only considers the claim to be an argument rather than a fact, as
Bloch (2010) mentioned in his study (233). Again, hedging would be and might are used with
reporting verbs, which assumes that writers carefully express a weak degree of strength of
their commitments to the claims.
Conclusion:
As mentioned above, Ädel and Hyland previous researches of most common reporting verbs
used across disciplines worked as a starting point for this study. At the same time, Bloch’s
research contributes great ideas to the present study.

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More specifically, as specified in research questions, the paper has tested the most common
reporting verbs across three disciplines BIO, LIN and PHI and answering the research
questions that according to the distribution of the most common reporting verbs across three
disciplines, it has been found that there are no clear patterns across disciplines, the only
difference is that philosophy has a number of prototypical verba dicendi than other disciplines.
Again, the analysis of rhetorical contexts of reporting verbs somehow shows that there are
many differences in the use of reporting verbs across three disciplines. For instance, in
biology, writers use reporting verbs to give more descriptions in their researches in order to
support their claims and to satisfy readers’ curiosity compared with philosophy. In linguistics,
it seems that writers use reporting verbs to give more explanations of the consequences of the
data in order to help readers understand their claims compared with biology. In philosophy,
writers use more reporting verbs especially speaking/mental verbs to contribute more mental
activities compared with the other two disciplines.
There are some observations that even though some reporting verbs such as explain are used
across disciplines, it is used for different purposes, such as the different uses of explain in
biology and in linguistics. Again, it is evident that in biology, writers choose neutral verbs to
report their claims, but they generally express a strong degree of strength of their
commitments to their claims by using adverbs, while in philosophy, writers choose strong
verbs to demonstrate their claims, but they normally express a weak degree of strength of
their commitments to the claims by using hedging. Unfortunately, in both linguistics and
philosophy, there is no information given in the integral/ nonintegral group, but in biology,
writers seem to show less emphasis on the authorship of the claim and less agreements with
others’ claims by using tentative verbs.
Of course, I am also aware of the limitation of the size of the samples, studying only one
corpus is really not enough in terms of work being conducted. Also, there are some limitations
of the paper that need to be pointed out: not all the reporting verbs on the lists are well
analyzed since the limitation of the research. The limitations leave plenty of room for further
research. What are the differences of the use of reporting verbs such as find and explain across
three disciplines? How reporting verbs are used in the integral/ nonintegral group in
linguistics and in biology? These are just a few questions of possible development that can
only be answered by further research.
Reference:

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Ädel Annelie & Garretson Gregory (2006). Citation practices across the disciplines: The case
of proficient student writing. University of Michigan press.
Bloch Joel (2010). A concordance-based study of the use of reporting verbs as rhetorical
devices in academic papers. Journal of Writing Research, 2 (2), 219-244.
Hyland, K (2009). Writing in the disciplines: Research evidence for specificity. Taiwan
International ESP Journal, Vol. 1: 1, 5-22.
Hyland, K (1998) Hedging in scientific research articles. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Hyland, K. (2005). Stance and engagement: A model of interaction in academic discourse.
Discourse Studies, 7, 173-292.
Lindquist, H.(2009). Corpus Linguistics and the description of English. Edinburgh University
Press.
McEnery, Tony, Richard Xiao & Yukio Tono. (2006). Corpus-based language studies: An
advanced resource book. London/ New York: Routledge.
Dahlia Remler (2014). Are 90% of academic papers really never cited? Reviewing the
literature on academic citations. Maximizing the impact of academic research. No page.
http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2014/04/23/academic-papers-citation-rates-
remler/
Appendix:
Function and strength Example verbs
NEUTRAL: verbs used to say what the writer
describes in factual terms, demonstrates,
refers to, and discusses, and verbs used to
explain his/her methodology.
describe, show, reveal, study, demonstate,
note, point out, indicate, report, observe,
assume, take into consideration, examine, go
on to say that, state, believe (unless this is a
strong belief), mention, etc.
TENTATIVE: verbs used to say what the writer
suggests or speculates on (without being
absolutely certain).
suggest, speculate, intimate, hypothesise,
moot, imply, propose, recommend, posit the
view that, question the view that, postulate,
etc.
STRONG: verbs used to say what the writer
makes strong arguments and claims for.
argue, claim, emphasise, contend, maintain,
assert, theorize, support the view that, deny,
negate, refute, reject, challenge, strongly
believe that, counter the view/argument that,
etc.
http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/al/learning_english/leap/grammar/reportingverbs/
http://micusp.elicorpora.info/