Rhetorical Functions of Reporting Verbs in Author Prominent Citations of Graduate Students’ Research Papers

Abstract

This study investigates the rhetorical functions of reporting verbs employed in the author prominent citations of research papers written by graduate students. Specifically, this study aims to 1) describe the use of reporting verbs functioning as research acts, cognition acts and discourse acts in the graduate students’ research papers, and 2) evaluate the appropriateness of those uses of reporting verbs in each research paper. Thus, the examples of the use, misuse, and overuse of the reporting verbs committed by the students were presented in this study. Following this, Hyland’s (2002) insightful framework is used as preliminary identification of the functional activities of research verbs, cognitive verbs, and discourse verbs. Documents analysis with checklist worksheet was used to obtain the data. The data comprised eighteen research papers completed as the final project of linguistic subject. The findings show that the students tend to use reporting verbs in discourse act category instead of research act and cognitive act categories. More specifically, the findings reveal that 1) for research act category, the most used verbs were ‘find’, ‘show’ and ‘identify’, 2) only the verb ‘believe’ was found in cognition act category, 3) the verb ‘state’ which belongs to the functional categories of discourse verb has the highest occurrence in all of the data. It means that the students tend to overuse and misuse the verb ‘state’ to present any kinds of cited sentences without fully understanding its functional meaning within the context. And 4) for the appropriateness of reporting verbs, the students’ problems were found on the misuses verb choice, tense choice, and syntactic pattern of the reported sentences. This indicates the students are likely to be unaware of the functional use of reporting verbs in cited sentences. To achieve successful communicative purpose in citing others’ work, students should be encouraged in advancing their knowledge to familiarize the meanings of reporting verbs within the context in academic writings.