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

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.