Evidentiality Within The Framework Of Perspective Space Theory

Evidentiality allows a speaker to communicate his/her attitude to the source of information. The linguistic forms of evidentiality are termed evidentials or evidential markers. With the growing attention on humanistic linguistics, recent few years have witnessed a breadth of researchers' vision of evidential study. Evidential study went through from the perspective of typology to that of cognition, epistemic modality, narratology and pragmatics. But scholars disagree on some issues concerning evidentiality, such as its definition, classification, and evidentiality has seldom been approached from the perspective of mental space theory.This thesis aims to approach evidentiality within the framework of perspective space theory, which is an essential part of mental space theory. It is argued that most of the evidentials can function as space builders, creating various spaces, such as time space, domain space, perspective space and so on. And evidentials can create new spaces and realize representation of perspective in four modes: direct mode, indirect mode, free indirect mode and implicit perspective.With a brief introduction to current study of evidentiality, Chapter One clarifies the motivation and objective of this thesis. Chapter Two is a literature review, which gives an account of historical development of evidential study and introduces issues concerning different definitions and classifications provided by scholars. The relationship between evidentiality and some related notions will also be explored in the end of Chapter Two. Chapter Three is the theoretical foundation of this thesis, which is made up of two parts. Part One is a brief introduction to the main content of mental space theory, with emphasis on the space building process. Part Two talks about perspective space, a significant type of mental space. The representations of perspective will be offered after a discussion on the notion and definition of perspective. An investigation into evidentiality within the framework of perspective space theory will be explored in Chapter Four. First, it will be pointed out that there is intersection part between evidential markers and space builders. Some linguistic forms function as both, or either, of them, within different research scopes. Then it shall be argued in this chapter how evidentiality involves the building of perspective space. A piece of news collected from The New York Times will be used to illustrate evidentiality within the framework of perspective space theory. Chapter Five gives some tentative conclusions and limitations as well as some suggestions for future study.This thesis will lay a sound foundation for theoretical study in evidentiality, leading a combination of evidentiality and perspective space theory. Furthermore, it can be regarded as guidance for empirical study in daily language, news text, narrative text and so on.