But while new work reveals its disciplinary credentials by being embedded in a ... frequently overuse naïve quotation with no evaluation (Bruce, 1989), and ... form of attribution in academic writing, the use of reporting verbs. ... citation was recorded only where the text attributed words to a specific author, thereby eliminating.
HYLAND, K. (2002). ACTIVITY AND EVALUATION: REPORTING PRACTICES IN ACADEMIC WRITING. IN J. FLOWERDEW (ED) ACADEMIC DISCOURSE.LONDON, LONGMAN. PP 115-30.
ACTIVITY AND EVALUATION: REPORTING PRACTICES IN ACADEMIC WRITING Ken Hyland
Reference to prior research is almost a defining feature of the academic research article. Even the most original paper integrates and represents ideas, concepts, findings and theories from other sources and, indeed, would be unlikely to reach publication if it did not. Specifically, such reporting represents in a new situation the way language was used in a previous context, and is defined for my purposes here as the attribution of propositional content to another source. 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 intertextual links to the wider discipline. Put simply, academic writing depends for its success on situating current work in a larger disciplinary narrative (Berkenkotter & Huckin, 1995; Hyland, 2000; Myers, 1990). 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 (Gilbert, 1977; Berkenkotter & Huckin, 1995).
By acknowledging a debt of precedent, a writer simultaneously accomplishes a number of rhetorical objectives. Interpersonally, judicious citation enables writers to display an allegiance to a particular community or theoretical orientation (Latour, 1987). It also helps them to build a credible writer ethos using citation to construct factual reliability and show they are prepared to stand behind their words. Scollon (1994), for example, has argued that attribution “constitutes a system for the creation of the academic self” as it presents to the reader a stance or position of responsibility. Rhetorically, citation helps to define a specific context of knowledge or problem to which the current work is a contribution. But while new work reveals its disciplinary credentials by being embedded in a community generated literature, it must also transcend this literature to create a niche for itself. Writers have to carve out a rhetorical gap from the weight of consensual knowledge (Swales, 1990), staking a claim to innovation while taking care to avoid a hostile depiction of previous work. The ability to handle citations to rhetorically construct a community consensus, and at the same time ensure that criticism stays within accepted bounds, is a central means of projecting one’s insider status.
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Despite this importance however, citation represents a feature which students, and particularly nonnative English speakers, find difficult to either use effectively in their writing or understand correctly in their reading (Campbell, 1990; Matalene, 1985; Pennycook, 1996). NNS writers of academic papers frequently overuse naïve quotation with no evaluation (Bruce, 1989), and rely on a restricted range of verbs, such as ‘say’ to introduce these quotes (Pickard, 1993a). This problem is often more than a deficit of vocabulary, but symptomatic of a larger issue of how to appropriately acknowledge sources in academic writing. There are considerable cultural differences in how writers from different backgrounds use prior texts in argument (eg. Bloch & Chi, 1995), and such differences also extend to notions of authorship and text ownership (Pennycook, 1996; Scollon, 1994). However, because reporting is such an important convention of academic writing in English, it is clearly worthwhile equipping students with the means of using it successfully. In this paper I focus on the most salient form of attribution in academic writing, the use of reporting verbs.
Reporting signals in academic discourse The significance of citation in academic writing and the obvious difficulties it poses for learners has led to considerable interest in the ways it is signaled, often as a basis for producing teaching materials.
The literature testifies to the availability of a wide range of reporting structures in English (eg. Thompson, 1996), although academic writing appears to rely on a sub-set of specialised conventions from within these, principally direct quote, paraphrase, summary and generalisation (eg. Dubois, 1988). One attribution feature of interest to researchers has been the distinction between integral and non-integral structures (Swales, 1990: 148), 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. The use of one form rather than the other appears to reflect a decision to give greater emphasis to either the reported author or the reported message. Research has also identified the rhetorical effects of various syntactic features, such as thematic position, tense, and voice, on the reported information (eg. Malcolm, 1987; Oster, 1981; Shaw, 1992) and to the role of reporting verbs.
3
The use of a reporting verb is one of the most explicit ways of attributing content to another source, and represents a significant rhetorical choice. The wide range of verbs that can be used to introduce reports allow writers to convey both the kind of activity reported and whether the claims are to be taken as accepted or not (Hunston, 1993; Tadros, 1993; Thomas & Hawes, 1994). Most obviously, verbs such as demonstrate, prove and show reveal the writer’s agreement with a prior statement, while hedges like suggest, indicate and imply open an “evaluative space” (Thompson & Ye, 1991: 369) in which the writer can withhold full commitment to present a contrast with a new view.
Thompson and Ye (1991) provide an interesting analysis of the relationships between reporting verbs and evaluation, and their categorization emphasizes the important distinction between the position of the reporting writer and the source author. However, their study was confined to the introduction sections of articles, which ignores a great deal of the reporting which occurs in humanities and social science papers, and involves a rather complex categorization system which separates evaluation from reporting and allows considerable overlap between categories. Thomas and Hawes (1994) alternative taxonomy offers a much clearer description of the network of options available to writers in medical articles. But while this scheme is easier to apply in identifying the functions of different verbs, it does not clearly reveal their evaluative potential nor always maintain the distinction between reporting and reported writer in identifying the source of this evaluation.
So while my study draws on these systems, it also seeks to offer a clearer description of reporting conventions in academic writing, to identify the preferences for different verbs among various disciplinary communities and, hopefully, to reveal some of the rhetorical purposes which motivate those preferences.
Corpus and methodology The study employs both qualitative and quantitative approaches, comprising frequency counts and text analyses of a corpus of published articles. The corpus of 80 research articles consists of one paper from each of ten leading journals in eight disciplines. The disciplines were selected to represent a broad crosssection of academic practice and to allow access to expert informants. Molecular biology and magnetic 4
physics represent the pure sciences, and mechanical engineering and electronic engineering the applied sciences. Philosophy and sociology are often categorised as either humanities or social sciences, while marketing and applied linguistics might be regarded as more applied social sciences. The journals were nominated by specialist informants as among the most important in their fields, and the articles chosen at random from current issues, selecting only those based on original data to compare papers with a similar rhetorical purpose. The scanned articles produced an electronic corpus of just over 500, 000 words after excluding abstracts and text associated with tables and graphics.
To locate reporting verbs, the corpus was computer searched for canonical citational forms such as a date in brackets, a number in squared brackets, and Latin references to other citations. This search left many citations unaccounted for however, particularly where writers’ renewed or extended their discussions of a previously mentioned author without the repetition of a reference. I therefore concordanced all the names in the bibliographies of these articles and of third person pronouns. A citation was recorded only where the text attributed words to a specific author, thereby eliminating general references to schools or beliefs such as “Marxists’ claim...” or “a constructionist model suggests…”. Examples of self citation were also ignored (see Hyland, 2001). This yielded 2, 287 examples of reporting verbs, about one every 220 words of text.
I then developed a way of categorizing these verbs, first examining samples from the corpus using the two models discussed above, and then refining the model through a constant comparison of devices in context. This inductive approach allows a theory to emerge from data and produced the model described below. Note that in the following discussion I adopt Thompson and Ye’s useful convention of referring to the person citing as the “writer” and the cited person as the “author”.
Functions of reporting verbs i. Process functions Like Thompson and Ye (1991) and Thomas and Hawes (1994), I classified the reporting verbs according to the type of activity they referred to. This gives three distinguishable processes:
5
1. Research (real-world) Acts. Verbs in this category represent experimental activities or actions carried out in the real world. They generally occur either in statements of findings (eg. observe, discover, notice, show) or procedures (eg. analyse, calculate, assay, explore, plot, recover). 2. Cognition Acts. These verbs are concerned with the researcher’s mental processes (eg. believe, conceptualize, suspect, assume, view). 3. Discourse Acts. These involve linguistic activities and focus on the verbal expression of cognitive or research activities (eg. ascribe, discuss, hypothesize, report, state). These categories are not watertight. Agree, for example, is a cognition act which carries a strong implication of verbal expression, while conclude is ambiguous between a mental and a discourse process, analyze may refer to physical or intellectual activities, and solve perhaps involves all three processes. However, it is possible to consistently attribute a particular meaning to all the verbs using this system and the categories do provide a comprehensive taxonomy for distinguishing the use of reporting verbs in terms of the primary aspects of the research process.
Analysis of all reporting verbs in the corpus revealed a clear preference for reporting information as Discourse Acts, with 57% of cases in this category. Most of the remaining instances were reported as Real-World Acts, and only 8% as Cognition Acts. Where writers chose to represent work as Research Acts, frequencies divided almost equally between verbs describing the author’s overall findings and those commenting on research procedures. Table 1 summarises these findings. Table 1: Distribution of verbs in process categories Category
Totals
Average per paper
%
Real World Acts Findings Procedures
786 437 349
9.8
35
Cognition Acts
193
2.4
8
Discourse Acts
1308
16.4
57
Total
2287
28.6
100
5.4 4.4
6
19 15
ii. Evaluative functions Within the process categories writers made more delicate decisions, exploiting the evaluative possibilities of reporting verbs to take either a supportive, tentative, critical, or neutral stance towards the reported claims. Here I depart from earlier work by representing writers’ choices as a single overarching scheme of options which includes both the original author’s academic activity and the reporting writer’s evaluative judgements. The scheme retains Thompson and Ye’s important insight however that while all reporting is mediated by the reporter, writers can vary their commitment by employing verbs which imply a personal stance, such as show, demonstrate, fail and ignore, or which attribute a position to the original author (accuse, believe, dispute, urge).
Each of the process categories therefore has a sub-set of evaluative options as set out in Figure 1 and elaborated below. Figure 1: Categories of reporting verbs Reporting
Research Acts
Findings
Factive
Procedures
Counter-factive
Cognition Acts
Positive
Discourse Acts
Critical Tentative Neutral
Non-factive
Tentative
Doubt
Critical
Assurance
Counters
Factive
Non-factive
Within the Findings category of Research Acts, writers can acknowledge their acceptance of the authors’ results or conclusions with factive verbs such as demonstrate, establish, show, solve or confirm. Alternatively they can adopt a counter-factive stance, portraying the author’s judgements as false or incorrect (fail, misunderstand, ignore, overlook). While these verbs might seem an effective way for writers to refute prior research and establish a niche for their own alternative position, such a direct challenge to the work of a single author was a choice rarely exercised in this corpus. Academics, it seems, appear to prefer more subtle ways of building on earlier literature. The final option is to comment on research findings non-factively, with no clear attitudinal signal as to their reliability (eg. find, identify, observe, obtain). These verbs accounted for the majority (55%) of references in the Research Findings category. Verbs which referred to procedural aspects of the 7
author’s investigation contained the greatest variety of expression in my corpus with 153 different verb forms, 36% of the total. As the following examples show, these verbs carry no evaluation in themselves but simply report research tasks neutrally: (1) Finally, Eto et al. (1994) reviewed and analyzed the contents of several indicators,..
(Mech)
Green and Wakefield compared the 20 cases they found in the newspaper with…
(Soc)
a "layer" coupled-slot finline structure was studied by Mazur[7] and Tech et al [8]…
(Phy)
Leow (1995) replicated an earlier study, Leow (1993), which investigated .…
(Ling)
Cognition Act verbs, which portray the cited work in terms of a mental process, handle evaluation rather differently. Instead of explicitly taking a personal stance on the reported information or opinion, writers here attribute a particular attitude to the cited author. There appear to be four clear options. Writers can represent the author as having a positive attitude to the material, accepting it as true or correct with verbs such as agree, concur, hold, know, think, or understand. Alternatively authors’ may be characterised as having a tentative view towards the reported matter (believe, doubt, speculate, suppose, suspect), or, more rarely, as taking a critical stance (eg. disagree, dispute, not think). Finally, the writer can portray the author as holding a neutral attitude towards the proposition (picture, conceive, anticipate, reflect).
Writers can also employ Discourse Act verbs to convey an evaluation of the cited material, and here they have the option of either taking responsibility for their interpretation, conveying their uncertainty or assurance of the correctness of the claims reported, or attributing a qualification to the author. The examples below show this distinction, indicating how writers can use discourse verbs to express their own viewpoint (2) or to ascribe it to the author (3): (2) As demonstrated by Baker et al. [2], the increased rate of flagellar RNA …..
(Bio)
Baddeley proposes a tripartite system of working memory,…
(Ling)
Although derived in 1965, recent work [59], verified that (2) still holds true.
(Elec)
As Hinde (1979) points out, many unhappy marriages remain intact because of…
(Mkt)
Villaruel-Ordaz, et al. (1993) report C. subnuda from the states of …
(Bio)
(3) Churchill abandoned speculative naturalism.
(Phil)
Eckstein criticizes psychological reductionism, rational choice, and ….
(Soc)
Jacoby accuses American intellectuals of a turn to conservatism,...
(Soc)
8
…. dismissed by some theorists as being depthless and superficial chatter (eg. Baudrllard, 1988; Jameson, 1991).
(Mkt)
Frenchio urged against changing….
(Phy)
Discourse verbs which express the writer’s view directly can be separated into doubt and assurance categories. Those which express doubt about reported claims can be further divided into verbs which are tentative (eg. postulate, hypothesize, indicate, intimate, suggest) and, more rarely, verbs which are directly critical (evade, exaggerate, not account, not make point). More frequent in the corpus than expressions of doubt are assurance verbs which introduce cited material in more positive and conclusive terms, either to neutrally inform readers of the author’s position (non-factive)or to use that position to support the writer’s own (factive). There is an enormous variety of verbs available for objectively passing information without interpretation, including high frequency items such as state, describe, discuss, report, answer, define, and summarize.
Alternatively, writers use assurance
discourse verbs to directly bolster their own views. These signal a supportive role for the reported information in the writer’s argument, often by attributing a high degree of confidence to the proposition by the original author. Examples include argue, affirm, explain, note, point out and claim.
The final sub-category of Discourse Act verbs, Counters, refer to what are taken to be the cited author’s own reservations or objections to the correctness of the reported message. That is, instead of taking responsibility for the evaluation as in Doubt verbs, the writer attributes these reservations to the original author. Among the examples in the corpus are deny, critique, challenge, attack, question, warn, refute and rule out. Thompson and Ye call such attributions Author Acts (1991: 371) and writers generally drew on such author refutations to either support their own opposition to a position, or to demolish an opposing argument. The overall results are presented in Figure 2 below.
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Fig 2: Overall distribution of reporting verbs
Research Acts 786 (35%)
Findings (56%)
Factive (41%) Counter-factive (4%) Non-factive (55%)
Procedures (44%) Positive (50%) Critical (5%) Tentative (20%) Neutral (25%)
Cognition Acts 193 (8%)
Doubt (24%) Discourse Acts 1308 (57%) Assurance (71%)
Tentative (95%) Critical (5%) Factive (42%) Non-factive (58%)
Counters (5%)
Disciplinary variations in reporting practices One issue of central concern to EAP teachers is the extent to which discourse features can be regarded as universal or as discipline-specific. Increasingly we are becoming aware of major distinctions in the ways different fields conduct their inquiries, justify their beliefs and structure their arguments (eg Bartholomae, 1986; Becher, 1989; Bruffee, 1986). We are also more mindful of the ways these differences are expressed through the interactive and rhetorical features of academic writing (eg. Bazerman, 1988; Hyland, 1998, 1999, & 2000; MacDonald, 1993). From a pedagogical point of view then, both postgraduate students and practicing academics need to be made aware of such disciplinary preferences in order to communicate with their peers using the most conventionally effective strategies. In terms of reporting structures, my analysis of this corpus suggests that while writers chose to present cited work in broadly similar ways, there were considerable disciplinary differences in the overall use of reporting verbs, in the frequencies of individual items, and in preferences for particular rhetorical categories.
Citing verbs do not occur in a textual vacuum. Language reports are presented in a carefully constructed reporting context which involves academic writers in conscious decisions about framing the imported material. Two central options here are how best to represent the original text and what emphasis to give to the original author. Overall, there were both broad similarities and differences in
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how writers in different disciplines exercised these options. Considerations of how to present a cited message mainly involve the extent to which a writer wishes to duplicate the original source material in his or her argument (Dubois, 1988; Thompson, 1996). The fundamental options are to either employ short direct quotes (of five or more words), use the original wording extensively in indented blocks, summarise from a single source, or present a generalised statement from several sources.
An analysis of half the articles in each discipline confirmed the impression that the overwhelming preference in all eight disciplines was for summary, an abbreviated statement of one work, with generalisation accounting for most of the remainder. It can be seen in Table 2 that direct quotation, which still seems to occupy a considerable amount of textbook space, and teacher time, was rarely employed and did not occur in the science and engineering papers at all. In the hard sciences this may be partly related to the suppression of explicit researcher intervention, but more generally the decision of writers to express cited material in their own terms represents the most effective way of supporting their own positions. Thus while students often overuse direct quotation (Campbell, 1990: 222), expert writers tend to be sparing with it, and are only likely to employ it when they consider the author’s original words to be the most persuasive means of presenting their case. Table 2: Presentation of cited work (%) Discipline Quote
Block Quote
Summary
Generalization
Biology
0
0
72
38
Physics
0
0
68
32
Electronic Engineering
0
0
66
34
Mechanical Engineering
0
0
67
33
Marketing
3
2
68
27
Applied Linguistics
8
2
67
23
Sociology
8
5
69
18
Philosophy
2
1
89
8
A second decision facing writers in citing material is whether to employ the reporting verb in an integral or non-integral environment (Swales, 1990). As noted earlier, integral structures (example 4 below) tend to give greater prominence to the cited author than non-integral contexts (as in 5): (4)
…some can be analysed in the manner suggested by Lewiss,… 11
(Phil)
Patrick O’Niell (1990) suggests that the growth of black humour is a peculiarly …
(Soc)
The study of Tadmor (1986) shows that fly ash and ESP ash are enriched with…
(ME)
Barry and Diamond (1984) and Dainty (1985) have argued that water relation…
(Bio)
(5) Several experiences have been reported in the literature on the millimeter wave interaction with snowcover [5-7] …
(Phy)
At least one writer (Stark, 1987) suggests that police leniency in ghettos is largely…
(Soc)
Reference [6] shows a spatial Euler-Savary analogue based on velocity and ...
(ME)
… recently examined modality differences in SLA (eg. Kirster, 1984; Leow, 1985),… (Soc) In this corpus, at least, there was again little disciplinary variation with an overwhelming preference for non-integral forms. As Table 3 shows, only the articles in philosophy, which typically consist of long narratives engaging the arguments of other writers, consistently included the cited author in the reporting sentence.
Table 3: Representation of author by discipline (%) Discipline
Non-Integral
Integral
Biology
90.2
9.8
Electronic Eng
84.3
Physics Mechanical Eng
Discipline
Non-Integral
Integral
Marketing
70.3
29.7
15.7
Applied Ling
65.6
34.4
83.1
16.9
Sociology
64.6
35.4
71.3
28.7
Philosophy
35.4
64.6
Disciplinary preferences for verb forms Despite these similarities in message form and author visibility, the distribution of reporting verbs in the corpus reveals broad disciplinary differences. There appear to be community-based preferences, both for specific items and the implications carried by particular semantic categories.
While all the papers in my corpus included reporting verbs, they were far more prevalent in the humanities and social science papers than in the hard sciences. This in fact mirrored the more explicit role of reference to prior research in these disciplines which occurred overall in the corpus. I have sought to account for these broad disciplinary differences elsewhere in terms of the distinctions between hard and soft knowledge domains (Hyland, 2000). Briefly, I believe the higher use of citations in the soft disciplines can be accounted for by the fact that (i) they typically have less cohesive and established frameworks of knowledge; (ii) they possess less highly formalized and 12
standardized codes for reporting research; (iii) they are more inclined to explicitly recognize the role of human agency in constructing knowledge; and (iv) they engage in more recursive patterns of investigation which involve more diverse and less predictable and abstract subjects than those typically found in the sciences.
We can see from Table 4 that the density of reporting structures differed substantially, with the average number of reporting verbs in the engineering and science papers all below the average for the corpus as a whole. Together there were just 619 reporting verbs in the 40 hard knowledge papers, amounting to only 27% of all examples, with physics accounting for less than 3% of the overall total. In terms of density of verbs per 1,000 words, the distribution looks slightly more even, with both engineering disciplines similar to the marketing figures and biology exceeding all but sociology and philosophy, which together accounted for 44% of all the reporting verbs in the corpus. Table 4: Reporting verbs by discipline Discipline
Reporting verbs
Most Frequent forms (ranked from left)
per paper per 1,000 words
%
Philosophy
57.1
7.3
say, suggest, argue, claim, point out, hold, think
25.4
Sociology
43.6
5.3
argue, suggest, describe, note, analyze, discuss
26.8
Applied Ling.
33.4
4.8
suggest, argue, show, explain, find, point out
28.5
Marketing
32.7
3.5
suggest, argue, find, demonstrate, propose, show
40.4
Biology
26.2
4.9
describe, find, report, show, suggest, observe
55.7
Electronic Eng.
17.4
3.4
propose, use, describe, show, publish, develop
38.0
Mechanical Eng.
11.7
3.1
describe, show, report, discuss, give, develop
30.7
Physics
6.6
2.0
develop, report, study, find, expand
42.4
Totals
28.6
4.6
suggest, argue, find, show, describe, propose, report 27.3
Table 4 also shows the most frequent forms found in each discipline and the proportion of total reporting verbs which these comprised. Over 400 different verbs were used to introduce citations, although the seven forms in the totals column constituted over a quarter of all cases and nearly half the forms in the corpus occurred only once. It appears from the figures 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. Clearly writers have the same potential range of items to draw on
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and so this preference for a limited number suggests a higher degree of conventionalisation in the ways that material is reported in these disciplines.
The most common verbs in the corpus were the discourse acts suggest (148 cases) and argue (103), followed by the research verbs find (92) and show (86), and the discourse verb describe (86). However, there were clear differences in the forms preferred by broad disciplinary areas. Writers in the social sciences and humanities, for example, greatly favoured argue (100% of cases), suggest (82%), and study (70%), while report (82%), describe (70%), and show (55%) occurred mainly in the science / engineering articles. Of the other forms which occurred more than 25 times in the corpus, the most marked distributional imbalances were say (95% in philosophy), use (70% electrical), examine (50% physics), report (53% biology), analyze (40% sociology) and observe (40% biology).
Process categories of reporting verbs The analysis shows a fairly clear division in the process categories which again corresponds to the traditional division between hard and soft disciplines (Table 5). Philosophy, sociology, marketing and applied linguistics largely employed Discourse Act reporting verbs (averaging 61% of the total for the four disciplines), and the engineering and science papers displayed a preference for Research-type verbs (50%). Cognition verbs were infrequent in almost all disciplines and were virtually absent in the engineering and physics papers, which together contained only 11 cases, or 6% of the total. Table 5: Distribution of verbs in process categories by discipline (%) Process
Biology
Physics
Elec Eng
Mech Eng
Mkting
App Ling Sociology Phil
Totals
Total n
262
66
174
117
327
334
436
571
2287
Research
43.1
56.0
55.2
47.0
31.2
30.5
29.1
23.5
33.5
Cognition
7.2
6.1
2.9
1.7
7.3
10.5
6.9
14.7
8.9
Discourse
49.7
37.9
41.9
51.3
61.5
59.0
64.0
61.8
57.6
These writers therefore clearly drew intertextual links to their disciplines in different ways, and these broadly reflected the preferred citation and argument forms of their discourse communities. The predilection for Research verbs and corresponding deficiency of Cognition forms in the science and 14
engineering papers, for example, together help to convey an experimental explanatory schema. This distribution contributes to an overall impression in the hard discipline papers of research activity as an inductive, impersonal and empirically-based endeavor. Here the reported facts are shown to emerge from laboratory activities rather than discursive practices, and the legitimacy of the information rests securely on the non-contingent, socially invariant standards of laboratory procedures. The following examples offer some flavour of this: (6) Grafstrom et al. [4] have studied photothermal currents….
(Phy)
... using special process and design [42], or by adding [101], or removing [83] a mask.
(Elec)
The relevant properties from each individual tensile test have been reported in reference (11) … (Mech) Marschner & Dell (1994) estimated that external hyphae of AM fungi can deliver up to.. (Bio) The reasons for this are examined in detail by Yeo et al (1990), Yeo (1994), and …
(Bio)
The greater use of Discourse Act forms in the humanities and social sciences, on the other hand, is more appropriate in an argument schema which more readily regards explicit interpretation, speculation and complexity as accepted aspects of knowledge. These disciplines are typically more discursive and examine relationships and features that are more subject to contextual and human irregularities than those studied in the hard sciences. Writers in the soft disciplines therefore employed arguments that made greater use of Discourse act forms which expedited the verbal exploration of such issues, facilitating qualitative arguments which rest on finely delineated interpretations and conceptualisations, rather than systematic scrutiny and precise measurement: (7) Lindesmith's (1965) classic work indicated the exclusion of blacks from managerial…
(Soc)
Davidson defends this claim on the grounds that without creatures using sentences…
(Phil)
Cass Sunstein makes the case that the best thing about republican thought is…
(Phil)
Ballard and Clanchy (1991) argue that cultural attitudes toward knowledge range from…(Ling) Over 25 years ago Hardy (1975) lamented that few managers really knew whether …
(Mkt)
Similarly, the fact that 85% of Cognitive verbs occurred in the humanities and social science papers admits to a greater role for personal interpretation in knowledge negotiation. In these disciplines the literature is frequently depicted in terms of the cited author’s theorizing and mental activities, thereby giving prominence to the role, and often the fallibility, of human agency in constructing claims. Thus through the use of Cognition verbs, the soft domain writers tend to represent research as proceeding 15
from the interpretive operations or verbal accounts of researchers, emphasising the part that reasoning and argument play in the construction of knowledge: (8)
Chomsky regards scientific work as, by definition, characterized by a high level of … (Ling) Donnelan believes that for most purposes we should take the demonstatum to be ..
(Phil)
Austin seems to assume that a classification of different verbs is eo ipso a …
(Ling)
Jerry Fodor thinks that it is irredeemably disjunctive.
(Phil)
Julian Hochfeld perceives PS as the only base for a unified ‘science of politics’…
(Soc)
Evaluative categories The evaluative categories show less obvious differences, with writers in all disciplines displaying a clear preference for neutral stances. While the selection of an appropriate reporting verb allows writers to signal their assessment of the evidential status of information, and thus demonstrate their degree of commitment to it, actual refutation is relatively rare. In fact, direct criticism does not occur in my science and engineering papers at all and is mainly confined to philosophy and sociology, where it constitutes 70% of all cases in the corpus (46 instances): (9) Donnelan overlooks intuitions of falsity through keeping…
(Phil)
…and the theory of Rawls in particular, unjustifiably ignore an unjust division of labor,...(Phil) Lillian Faderman has also probably exaggerated the pervasiveness of ….
(Phil)
What Travers fails to explain is why, given these differences in local context, ..
(Soc)
But they do not explain why elites no longer exhibit …..
(Soc)
It is also worth noting that negation reporting verbs also tend to be largely drawn from the categories of Discourse and Cognition Acts. Because these focus on authors’ interpretations or texts, rather than their research, they are potentially a less challenging form of criticism as they avoid any direct attack on the author’s competence or reputation (cf. Thompson & Ye, 1991:377).
Overall however it appears that if the writer wishes to offer a negative assessment of another’s viewpoint, this is not typically signaled by the reporting verb. Explicit rebuttal of other researchers is a serious face-threatening act in academic writing (Myers, 1989), and such violation of interpersonal conventions is likely to expose the writer to retaliation or the disapproval of publishing gatekeepers (Hyland, 1998). Refutation is therefore likely to be heavily mitigated and involve considerable rhetorical work to accomplish (eg. Pickard, 1993b). Indeed, the fact that most rebuttals in the corpus 16
were expressed in terms of omission, an assessment that a particular act was not performed, might itself be seen as a mitigating strategy.
Also infrequent are Counters, or cases where the writer represents the cited author as holding a tentative or negative stance to the reported information. Generally, where writers imputed positions to authors they generally expressed them positively or neutrally as cognition verbs. Again, the vast majority of counters occurred in the sociology and philosophy papers with almost no examples in the hard knowledge corpora: (10) Vernon and Sewell seriously question the materialist premises of Thompson's work,… (Soc) Tilly has, in fact, complained that RMT ‘identifies the amassing or spending of …
(Soc)
…deregulation has been blamed or small grocery failures in Australia (Harty, 1994), … (Mkt) … which are dismissed by some theorists as superficial chatter (eg Baudrillard, 1988; Jameson, 1991)..
(Mkt)
…the idea of a characterless substructure is rejected by Aristotle in Metaphysics.
(Phil)
…cited and criticized by Coates, (1984, p. 111).
(Phil)
…..Donald Downs decries restrictions on pornography.
(Phil)
However, both Davidson and Wittgenstein explicitly disown the view ..
(Phil)
Scientists and engineers were far more likely to report information non-factively, with 66% of all reporting verbs in these disciplines in this category. These verbs help to rhetorically represent the norms of impersonality and impartiality which are professed to characterise inquiry the hard knowledge fields, providing an acknowledgement of prior research without appearing to corrupt it with personal judgement. This is particularly apparent where writers also chose to remove the cited author, and thus the implication of human intervention, from the reporting sentence: (11) Ref. [9] developed finite formulations and corresponding code.
(Phy)
Fig. 1 shows the CEMS spectra recorded at room temperature using a He/CH4 gas-flow detector described elsewhere [6], …
(Phy)
…properties of a line trajectory in spatial motion are researched by Refs [21-23], … (Mech) … other solutions have also been published [5-7]
(Elec)
Less often, these writers employed reporting verbs to signal their acceptance of prior research (22% of verbs in the hard knowledge fields). Virtually all the remaining cases were tentative Discourse act verbs, conveying a implication of uncertainty or less than full commitment: 17
(12) Sacc. is considered a nomen confusum (Hughes, 1958)…..
(Bio)
These studies imply that microtubule penetration into…
(Bio)
Preliminary data (Gentzis, 1993) indicate U to have predominantly … Burbidge (1992) suggests that a manned cell should not contain more than…
(Mech) (Elec)
A theory based on the demagnetization field has been suggested by Warren et al [13-15]..(Phy)
The fact that reporting verbs were more likely to carry the writer’s evaluative stance in the humanities and social science papers reflects the more disputational and discursive rhetorical style of these disciplines. Evaluation allows writers to both engage with the disciplinary literature in a continuing debate and to negotiate the value of their own contribution by opening a discursive space in that literature, building on what has gone before. This is particularly evident in the fact that writers in the soft disciplines were also more likely to evaluate cited information by adding adverbial comment to the reporting verb, often to strongly align themselves with that position: (13) He argues there, correctly to my mind, that ….
(Phil)
Churchland correctly rejected this move…
(Phil)
Benveniste (1969: 116 and 166-168) rightly points out how the act of swearing is …
(Ling)
As Dipankar Gupta correctly asserts …
(Soc)
Wilson rightly says that many important social scientific theories have….
(Soc)
In sum, the reporting options found in this corpus appear to be more than simply the stylistic proclivities of individual writers. Instead, they can be seen as reflecting disciplinary preferences for particular forms of rhetorical expression which, in turn, instantiate the different procedures and epistemological understandings of particular fields of inquiry.
Some conclusions on reporting and EAP Although reference to previous work is virtually obligatory in academic writing, I have tried to show here that the ways writers choose to present information varies according to the discourse communities they inhabit. The options offered by the network of reporting verbs are an important means by which writers are able to appropriately link their local contributions into a wider disciplinary framework and so persuade readers of their ideas. These findings, I believe, have important consequences for novice
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research writers, and for those who teach them., as once again we have support for the view that students entering academic communities need to acquire and employ a discipline-specific literacy.
A growing body of research into academic discourse has demonstrated that students have specialized communicative needs which are defined by the social purposes and rhetorical practices of their specific target communities. Although initially focused on undergraduates, this research has progressively responded to the needs of more advanced groups, and the particular demands of research writing are now recognised as representing a serious challenge to both post-grad students (Paltridge, 1997) and L2 academics seeking to publish in English (Flowerdew, 1999). Although reporting is often treated in EAP materials as the application of standardised conventions and advice about avoiding plagiarism (eg. Lester, 1993), students need to know more than the necessity and mechanics of referring to an existing literature. They also have to present that literature in ways that their readers are likely to find convincing.
The selection of a particular reporting verb is a delicate choice as it is a crucial means of both situating one’s work appropriately and communicating with ones peers effectively, a way of engaging with colleagues and of appealing to the epistemological and interactive understandings of one’s community. Selecting a particular verb thus not only signals a reported voice, but invokes a precise context of meaning and judgment which locates the writer in a certain relationship to the reader and the reported text. This can critically influence a reader’s willingness to go along with a writer and accede to her claims.
Clearly more work needs to be done. In particular, there has been no space to discuss the typical rhetorical functions of the reports in which particular categories of verb occur, and I have said nothing about the effect of negation on the use of specific verbs. Moreover, the study is restricted to research papers and does not address other academic genres that students are commonly required to read or produce, such as theses, reports and survey papers. However, the taxonomy suggested here offers a fairly straightforward and useful way of identifying the meanings of different choices and of mapping the dimensions of difference between disciplines and genres. The need to distinguish the particular 19
rhetorical features common to specific disciplines is a growing pedagogical imperative in university writing courses, and reporting is clearly one area where students urgently require more assistance. So, while various applications and investigations remain, this study may contribute to a fuller understanding of research reporting and to the development of materials for novice academic writers.
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