A corpus-based study of reporting verbs in academic Portuguese

Abstract

Referring to other sources is a cornerstone in academic writing and one way of framing someone else’s ideas is through reporting verbs. There is little research on this phenomenon in academic Portuguese. Most of these studies analyze reporting practices without focusing on linguistic aspects (Bessa 2011; Hoffnagel 2010), with few studies on reporting verbs (Souza and Mendes 2012). The aim of this paper is to analyze how reporting verbs are used in the Corpus of Portuguese for Academic Purposes (CoPEP; Kuhn and Ferreira 2020), a corpus of research articles in Brazilian and European Portuguese. CoPEP was divided into two subcorpora: one with texts related to Hard Science (engineering, exact-earth science, and health science), and another with texts related to Soft Science (applied social science and humanities). Sketch Engine (Kilgarriff et al. 2014) was used to extract the verbs that are used before and after the lemma autor ‘author’. Results indicate that texts in Hard Science have a slightly higher frequency of reporting verbs than texts in Soft Science, but both rely on similar reporting verbs to cite the voice of others. There is preference for the present tense in comparison with past and future, for the active voice in detriment of the passive voice, and for the order ‘author + verb’.