| Summary: | 博士 === 國立政治大學 === 英國語文學系 === 105 === Reporting verbs are important in academic research papers for paraphrasing and reviewing previous studies to support a writer’s positions. While a large number of studies have been carried out to investigate the evaluative potential and rhetorical functions of reporting verbs in citations, comparatively little research has focused on the phraseological patterns of particular common reporting verbs, the exploration of which can be beneficial in raising student awareness of the recurrent associations of words and structures of reporting in academic written discourse. This study aims at examining the syntactic and semantic environments of two frequent near-synonymous reporting verbs, PROPOSE and SUGGEST. According to Hyland (1998a) and Hinkel (2016), PROPOSE and SUGGEST both can mean ‘putting forward something for consideration’ and are frequently applied to mitigate the certainty of a statement (e.g., Hyland, 1998a; Hinkel, 2016). We expect to distinguish the two verbs from each other and offer a more comprehensive phraseological profile of them in academic writing.
We used the subcorpus of academic writing in the 450 million-word Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) as the source data to investigate the performance of PROPOSE and SUGGEST in V-base form, V-s form, V-ed form, and V-ing form. Based on the corpus, the analysis focused on three aspects: (1) the grammatical patterns of PROPOSE and SUGGEST; (2) the distribution of animate and inanimate subjects of the dominant patterns of PROPOSE and SUGGEST; (3) the semantic classification of the objects of PROPOSE and SUGGEST. In addition to the quantitative methods, qualitative-based concordance line analysis was also implemented to reveal the characteristics of the broader stretches of discourse where PROPOSE and SUGGEST occur.
The results show that the two reporting verbs are distinct from each other. While SUGGEST has a rather strong propensity for co-occurring with that-clause, for PROPOSE, the possibilities of co-appearing with a simple noun object and with a that-clause are similar. In addition, PROPOSE is more likely to have animate subjects, whereas SUGGEST prefers inanimate subjects. As for the simple noun objects of the two verbs, a large number of instances occurring with PROPOSE systematically belong to the semantic groups of COGNITION, METHOD, and STANDARD; SUGGEST shows more preference for POSSIBILITY nouns, STATE nouns, QUALITY nouns and RELATION nouns. The inter-comparison of the results of PROPOSE and SUGGEST suggests that, in academic writing, PROPOSE usually carries the sense of ‘to offer a plan or action for others to consider’, whereas SUGGEST tends to mean ‘to communicate or show an idea, which is likely to be true’. Moreover, the differences across four word forms of PROPOSE and SUGGEST were also identified. It was found that [suggest that-clause] prefers subjects referring to research results, but [suggests that-clause] occurs with the subjects referring to articles or studies on a particular topic more frequently. Overall, in terms of functions, PROPOSE is mainly used for describing the action of offering something as a choice for people to think carefully; SUGGEST, in contrast, serves to interpret a research finding or present an argument suggested by previous studies and literature.
The present study sheds light on the phraseological difference between synonyms. It has also proved that different word forms of the same lemma have different choices of collocations and phraseologies. The research findings will contribute to the teaching and research of English for academic purposes since they provide a systematic analysis of the different habitual collocations of two frequent and similar reporting verbs in research articles. We believe this study will bring some insights to the designs of language teaching materials and can serve as the basis for future studies on the co-occurrence patterns and phraseologies of verbs.
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