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Article published In: Australian Review of Applied Linguistics
Vol. 49:1 (2026) ► pp.112–145

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Contextualizing verb forms and determining their association in reporting and reported clauses

A corpus-based study of academic citations in language and linguistics journal articles

ORCiD logo with link | Ubon Ratchathani University
Published online: 30 September 2025
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/aral.24130.thi
Abstract
Verb forms are indispensable time-reference expressions in academic citations. While they are often exploited for rhetorical functions, they are observed to be contextualized by citational and linguistic features (henceforth, citation-internal features). This study examines the association between citation-internal features and verb forms, identifying which features contextualize the use of reporting and reported verb forms. It also investigates the relationship between reporting and reported verb forms. Data were drawn from 3,694 citations from a corpus of 852 journal articles in language and linguistics and subjected to chi-square tests and residual analyses. The results indicate the association between citation-internal features and citation verb forms in reporting and reported clauses. Multiple sources, non-integral citations, general and non-human subjects, and non-research verbs contextualize the simple present, present perfect, and modal forms, while single sources, integral citations, definite and human subjects, and research verbs contextualize the simple past. The results also show that the simple past in the reporting clause is associated with the simple past in the reported clause, whereas the simple present and present perfect in the reporting clause, competing time-reference forms, are associated with the simple present and modal forms in the reported clause. The study highlights the importance of considering citation-internal contexts and the temporal relationship between reporting and reported clauses when teaching academic citations.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Literature review
    • 2.1Forms, semantics, and functions of time-reference forms
    • 2.2Contextualizing time-reference forms in academic citations
    • 2.3Temporal association between reporting and reported clauses
    • 2.4Summary and research questions
  • 3.Method
    • 3.1Inclusion and exclusion criteria
    • 3.2Final dataset
    • 3.3Citation extraction
    • 3.4Variables and data coding
    • 3.5Statistical analysis
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Association between citation-internal features and verb forms
      • 4.1.1Number of sources
      • 4.1.2Citation forms
      • 4.1.3Subject animacy
      • 4.1.4Subject definiteness
      • 4.1.5Meaning groups
      • 4.1.6Activity verbs
      • 4.1.7Evaluation verbs
      • 4.1.8Reporting voice
    • 4.2Relationship between citation verb forms in reporting and reported clauses
  • 5.Discussion
    • 5.1Association between citation-internal features and citation verb forms
    • 5.2Relationship between reporting and reported verb forms
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Data availability
  • Acknowledgements
  • Disclosure statement
  • Notes
  • References
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