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

Abstract

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 .