The Study of Syntactic and Semantic Features of Verbs In Problem Statement Section of Master Theses

The present study was carried to investigate the realisation of verbs in problem statement of English Language Teaching (ELT) theses. To reach this objective, 40 ELT theses, were chosen from reliable databases (ProQuest). The corpus was read carefully to identify the grammatical verbs. Then, the identified verbs were classified based on tenses, aspects and voices. Tenses comprise three tenses of present, past and future. Aspects consist of simple, progressive and perfect. Voices can be either active or passive. To analyse the data for the semantic meanings of the identified verbs, Biber et al.’s (1999) classification was used. After scrutinising the problem statements of forty theses, the data, it was found that the verbs of different tenses, aspects, voices and semantic meanings were used. The findings were discussed to give a clear picture of how verbs are used in problem statements of theses written by native writers of English. The findings may help instructors to equip their students with the ability to use the verbs appropriately in writing the problem statement of their theses.