A Study on the Use of Reporting Verbs in Academic Papers by Native English Speakers

——Taking “Argue” and “Suggest” as Examples

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-364-1_52How to use a DOI?

Keywords

reporting verbs; academic writing; native English speakers; corpus

Abstract

This study uses a combination of quantitative and qualitative analysis to analyse the use of the reporting verbs “argue” and “suggest” in Michigan Corpus of Upper-Level Student Papers. It is found that: 1) Upper-level native English-speaking students uses “suggest” more frequently and “argue” less frequently in their academic writing. “Suggest” and “argue” are most often found in the third person singular; 2) “Argue” is often paired with animate subjects, “suggest” with inanimate subjects; 3) “Argues for/against” is the most frequent collocation of “argue”, and “suggest” is often used with “seem (s) to”. This study may provide references for Chinese English learners to use reporting verbs in academic writing.

Copyright

© 2025 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Xinyi Zeng
PY  - 2025
DA  - 2025/03/17
TI  - A Study on the Use of Reporting Verbs in Academic Papers by Native English Speakers
BT  - Proceedings of the 2024 4th International Conference on Education, Language and Art (ICELA 2024)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 419
EP  - 425
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-364-1_52
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-364-1_52
ID  - Zeng2025
ER  -