City University of Hong Kong

GE2412: English for Humanities and Social Sciences

Language Discovery Project

Group members: Yau Ho Yi (55842857)

                                                Chan Siu Fai, Bruce (55857650)

Group: T06

Word Count: 1004

The Analysis of the Differences in Frequency of “Warn”, “Declare” and

“Specify” under Academic Disciplines: A Corpus-Based Study

Research papers have been deemed as a sophisticated artifact to present the

researched factual findings and exchange information among the academic

community through rhetorical discourse (Hyland, 1999). In doing so, it is suggested

that writers should be using academic language for the purpose of being objective and

depersonalizing (Bloch, 2010; Perales Escudero, 2012). One of the most important

elements is the usage of reporting verbs, a common rhetorical device in academic

writing that serves as a function of establishing credibility and relationship when

making claims in relation to the cited sources (Bloch, 2010). For example, it can be

used to demonstrate authors’ attitudes (e.g. agreement or disagreement) towards

others’ statements.

Although reporting verbs are widely adopted in the academic community,

multiple research journals pointed out that the use of reporting verbs could be varied

in preference across different conditions (Vogel, 2012; Manan & Noor, 2014; Maher,

2016). In 2012, a study analyzed the frequency and pattern of using reporting verbs in

studies with different discipline backgrounds, concluded individuals from each

specific discipline has a unique and distinctive tendency for the choice of reporting

verbs (Vogel, 2012). Another study published in 2014 also found a similar situation

that post-graduate students prefer to use a set of specific reporting verbs from the

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research category (Manan & Noor, 2014). However, it is necessary to highlight that

the generalizability of their results is questionable in which the findings of these two

journals presented were not built on a large amount of data. In other words, the

reliability of these studies is partially confined by their methodology. Herein, this

paper will choose three of the most commonly used reporting verbs in the branch of

law/politics found by the study of Vogel in 2012 in comparison with the branch of

science/technology. 

In order to investigate whether a difference is present across disciplines in

word choices, corpus, the trending data-oriented approach that relies on an enormous

database of literature collections for English rhetorical analysis (Simon-Maeda, 2016;

Shin, Velázquez, Swatek, Staples & Partridge, 2018), was deployed in this study.

Lastly, the authors of this paper predict that the occurrences of three chosen words

will be higher in the genre of law/politics than the genre of science/technology. 

Methodology

All data were extracted from the Corpus of Contemporary American English

(COCA). COCA comprises over 560 million words and divides into different genres

and sub-genres. It also provides examples of the words used from different texts. In

this study, the three selected reporting verbs, which are “warn”, “declare” and

“specify”, were preliminarily marked with “in all forms” during the searching

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process. The data was then queried in the sub-genre of science/technology and

law/politics under the specified category of COCA-academic. The first 100 lines of

concordance were collected to compare and analyze the pattern of use across three

words.

Result

According to Table (1), there are 3346 occurrences of ‘warn’ (all forms) in

COCA-academic. It shows that the frequency of ‘warn’ in the law/politics field is

much higher than science/technology field with statistically 506 and 226 in

law/politics discipline and science/technology discipline respectively. 

Table 1. The frequency of use of ‘warn’ under different genres and sub-genres

On the report of Table (2), the frequency of ‘declare’ (all forms) is 7500 in

COCA-academic. It shows that ‘declare’ is more likely to be appeared in the field of

law/politics than in the area of science/technology, with 1323 and 395 occurrences

each respectively.

Table 2. The frequency of use of ‘declare’ under different genres and sub-genres
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 From Table (3), there are 5057 occurrences of ‘specify’ (all forms) in COCA-

academic. It shows that the frequency of ‘specify’ is slightly higher in

science/technology discipline than in law/politics discipline, with the number of 1102

and 570 respectively.

Table 3. The frequency of use of ‘specify’ under different genres and sub-genres

Discussion

The present study first predicted that the frequency of three targeted words will

be higher in the genre of law/politics than the science/technology. Unsurprisingly, the

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results from COCA demonstrated that “declare” and “warn” are aligned with our

prediction. It is also in line with the results of Vogel’ s study (2012) that people from

law/politics field tend to use these two words more frequently.  This could be

explained by the idea of soft and hard discipline proposed by McGrath (1978).

Law/politics discipline is classified as a soft discipline, whereas science/technology is

defined as a hard discipline (Day & Hall, 2010; LeBard, Thompson, Micolich &

Quinnell, 2012). Regarding the definition of soft discipline, Ibrahimova (2016)

suggested that the authors tend to use the tentative and strong reporting verbs in the

soft discipline. Correspondingly, those neutral and objective reporting verbs are

predominantly used in the hard discipline.

Likewise, due to the rhetorical characteristics of law/politics as being subjective

and argumentative, some words are comparatively more suitable and popular in their

preferred list of word option. According to Figure (1), from the law/political

discipline, it shows that the use of ‘warn’ appeared in these sources is to convince and

persuade readers to be aware of the potential risks of any kind that might happen. On

the other hand, Figure (2) illustrates the use of “declare” in examples. One

commonality for using “declare” is that these sentences are to be stressing the

ongoing political situation induced by involving different parties.

Figure 1. The concordance lines of ‘warn’ under Law/Tech under discipline

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Figure 2. The concordance lines of ‘declare’ under Law/PolSci discipline

Whereas, the word “specify” showed a different pattern from the current

paper’s prediction that the results from COCA stated that the occurrence of the word

is slightly higher in the category of science/technology than the category of

law/politics. This is in opposition to Vogel’s study that “specify” should be prevalent

and manifest in the writing content of law/politics, albeit the author had not made any

investigation towards academic fields other than “soft” discipline. One of the possible

explanations accounting for this circumstance is that when the research of

science/technology are making clarification and justification for their approach, it is

common to use words like “specify” to incrementally crystalize the abstract

framework. Referring to Figure (3), from the branch of science/technology, the word

“specify” is more often to occur in the survey methodology, in which the authors use

‘specify’ to further explain or describe their research detail.

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Figure 3. The concordance lines of ‘specify’ under Sci/Tech discipline

Conclusion

This study aims to compare and analyze the differences of the frequencies of

‘warn’, ’declare’ and ‘specify’ under the law/politics and the science/technology

disciplines through COCA. It is suggested that the use of reporting verbs largely

depends on the characteristics of a specific discipline in which induce a different

preference in writing manner.

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 References

Bloch, J. (2010). A concordance-based study of the use of reporting verbs as

rhetorical devices in academic papers. Journal of Writing Research, 2(2), 219-

244. doi:10.17239/jowr-2010.02.02.7

Day, T. R., & Hall, R. C. (2010). Deja Vu: From Comic Books to Video Games:

Legislative Reliance on Soft Science to Protect against Uncertain Societal Harm

Linked to Violence v. the First Amendment. Or. L. Rev., 89, 415.

Hyland, K. (1999). Academic attribution: Citation and the construction of

disciplinary knowledge. Applied Linguistics, 20(3), 341-367.

doi:10.1093/applin/20.3.341

Ibrahimova, S. I. (2016). Features of reporting verbs in modern English.

International Journal of English Linguistics, 6(2), 79

LeBard, R., Thompson, R., Micolich, A., and Quinnell, R. "Identifying common

thresholds in learning for students working in the 'hard' discipline of science."

Presented at UniServe Science Motivating Science Undergraduates: Ideas and

Interventions, Sydney, 1 - 2 October 2009.

Manan, N. A., & Noor, N. M. (2014). Analysis of reporting verbs in Master's theses. 

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 Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences, 134, 140-145. doi:10.10

16/j.sbspro.2014.04.232

Maher, P. (2016). The use of semi-technical vocabulary to understand the

epistemology of a disciplinary field. Journal of English for Academic Purposes,

22, 92-108. doi:10.1016/j.jeap.2016.01.010

Perales Escudero, M.D. (2012). Specifying the construct of academic vocabulary:

Functional and discursive perspectives. The Journal of Language and Linguistics

Studies, 8(1), 132-147.

Shin, J., Velázquez, A. J., Swatek, A., Staples, S., & Partridge, R. S. (2018).

Examining the effectiveness of corpus-informed instruction of reporting verbs in

L2 first-year college writing. L2 Journal, 10(3). doi:10.5070/l210337022

Simon-Maeda, A. (2016). A corpus-based study of the AAAL conference handbook.

Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 23, 71-82.

doi:10.1016/j.jeap.2016.06.001

Vogel, R. (2012). VERBS FOR REFERRING TO SOURCES IN HUMANITIES

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 AND SOCIAL SCIENCES: GRAMMATICAL AND LEXICAL ANALYSIS

OF THEIR DISTRIBUTION. Discourse and Interaction, 5(1), 63-82.

Appendix

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Appendix 1 Concordance lines of ‘warn’ in all forms in Law/PolSci field:

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Appendix 2 Concordance lines of ‘warn’ in all forms in Sci/Tech field:

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Appendix 3 Concordance lines of ‘declare’ in all forms in Law/PolSci field:

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Appendix 4 Concordance lines of ‘declare’ in all forms in Sci/Tech field:

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Appendix 5 Concordance lines of ‘specify’ in all forms in Law/PolSci field:

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Appendix 6 Concordance lines of ‘specify’ in all forms in Sci/Tech field:

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