Identifying the Patterns of the Near-synonymous Attributive Verb Pairs in the Academic Written Text
International Journal on Studies in English Language and Literature · 2016
In a piece of an academic written discourse, it is important to present an argument logically and cohesively.The researcher has often to report, evaluate and discuss previous research findings with attributive verbs.It is a great misinterpretation to say that an author 'argues' when what s/he is actually doing is 'report'.The difficulty with using these verbs is that there are many of them, and each of them has a slightly different, and often subtle shade of meaning.For example, the word 'notes' implies a fact but is weaker than 'points out', but they share similar denotative meanings.The present corpus-based study aims to examine the function and usage of the synonymous attributive verbs, hoping to offer insights into expert performance and contribute to classroom practices.