Patterns of distribution of verbs for referring to sources : implications for teaching EAP in humanities
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| Year of publication | 2013 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | Mastering various skills of English for Academic Purposes has become a necessity for successful study and work in the globalised world of science. The productive skill of academic writing can be taught, learnt and performed on the basis of numerous conventions and formal requirements, which help to make the language of academic texts formulaic, predictable, and consequently easy to understand and use by professionals in individual disciplines. This paper looks into one such conventional tool which is crucial to the principle of honesty in science, namely the ways how reference to sources is made. Sources can be acknowledged either by so-called verbs for referring to sources (VRS), i.e. verbs contained in signal clauses of a given text, or by bare parenthetic references using the format of brackets or notes. The referring verbs include not only literal verbs of speaking, writing and reporting, but a variety of other semantic classes. Also their grammatical properties manifest a considerable variety, specifically in the use of tenses, voice, aspect, number, and person. A question arises if there exist any regular distributional patterns of reference using VRS, their semantic types and grammatical forms, and parenthetic reference not introduced by such verbs. The current research analyses academic papers published in humanities and social sciences and attempts to establish the proportions of types and forms of VRS. The corpus consists of texts by both native and non-native authors of English papers, since internationalisation of scientific discourse is an indisputable fact. Nevertheless, the research has focused on quality papers by expert authors only so it does not deal with possible native vs. non-native differences. The findings concerning the current usage of various types of reference have practical application in teaching EAP. |
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