TENSE CHOICES IN CITATIONS

This paper examines tense, aspect, and voice choices in the reporting verbs in a corpus of research articles from the Journal of Psychosomat ic Medicine. The study also investigates how such choices correlate wi th other syntactic elements (e.g., subject) in the citations, as well as with the discourse functions of the citations in their contexts. Th e findings are that the main choices for the verb in reporting sentenc es in the data are the past tense (mainly in the active form with a fe w passives), the present tense, and the present perfect (active and pa ssive). We also note particular features such as syntactic structure a ssociated with the citations using the three tenses. Tense choices are seen to correlate with a categorization of reporting verbs into disco urse and non-discourse verbs. Finally, the discourse functions of the citations with these tense choices are described. Citations with past tense verbs and named researchers as subject seem to have the discours e role of providing particulars for a preceding generalization or the basis for a claim. Citations with present tense verbs generally have t he discourse function of communicating generalized interpretations/con clusions and also suggest writer commitment to the reported informatio n. Present perfect tense in citations serves to highlight the direct r elevance of previous studies to the reporting writer's own research wr ite-up.