Reporting Verbs in Hard and Soft Sciences of Journal Article Abstracts: An Insight from Indonesia

Abstract

Reporting verbs (RVs) express varying degrees of alignment and evaluate the credibility and merit of the reported claims in academic writing. This study aims to explore RVs’ tenses, frequencies, and functions in two major disciplines: hard science and soft science. Consequently, two specialised corpora were built from research article abstracts published in 2021–2022. The hard science corpus comprised 19,512 words; meanwhile, the soft science corpus contained 20,222 words. The Constituent Likelihood Automatic Word-tagging System (CLAWS) web tagger was utilised to identify RVs, and Antconc software was employed to retrieve RVs. The study findings revealed that RVs in hard science and soft science were employed in four tenses forms, i.e. past participle, present participle, infinitive, and past tense. Further, the study indicated that based on the frequencies, soft science employed RVs more frequently than hard science. However, based on functions, hard science utilised RVs more comprehensively than soft science. Hard science and soft science have distinctive ways of implementing RVs in the Indonesian journal article abstracts. Thus, designing an RVs list specialised for non-native English (NNE) students, authors, teachers, and instructors is recommended to strengthen each discipline’s academic writing proficiency.

Keywords

• Corpus linguistics
• English for academic purposes
• reporting verbs
• journal article abstracts