Abstract

Reporting verbs (RVs) play a major role in academic writing by enabling authors to cite previous research, express evaluative stances, and position their studies within a disciplinary context. Despite extensive research on RVs in Applied Linguistics and other fields, their use in Translation Studies remains underexplored. Addressing this gap, this corpus-based study investigates the distributional patterns and communicative functions of RVs in the literature review sections of Translation Studies journal articles. A specialised corpus (CTSJ) comprising 52 research articles (69,182 tokens) from six JCR-indexed Translation Studies journals published between 2015 and 2025 was compiled. Reporting verbs were manually annotated according to Hyland’s (2002) taxonomy and analysed using the functional framework developed by the University of Adelaide Writing Centre (2014). The findings suggest the predominance of Research Acts, particularly Procedure verbs, whereas Discourse Acts and Cognition Acts occur less frequently. Functionally, evaluation and examination, presentation, and conclusion are the dominant reporting functions. Overall, RVs function primarily to present empirical evidence, evaluate previous research, and establish disciplinary knowledge while negotiating authorial stance. Citation practices appear to be characterised by methodological reporting, cautious evaluation, and limited confrontation. This study contributes to research on reporting verbs in Translation Studies and provides a corpus-based description of RV use in the discipline. The findings offer insights into disciplinary citation practices and have implications for academic writing instruction and English for Academic Purposes (EAP) pedagogy.