A Study Of Evidentiality Of COVID-19 News Discourse In The New York Times From The Systemic Functional Linguistics Perspective

Evidentiality is a prominent concept that has garnered the attention of many linguists in recent years as a prevalent linguistic phenomenon in many languages.It is primarily concerned with the information source and the speaker’s attitude toward the information’s credibility.Evidentials or evidential forms are language forms of evidentiality.The majority of previous studies looked at evidentiality in various contexts,such as news,advertising,and political speeches.And the focus of these investigations was on evidence from semantics and pragmatics.This thesis aims to make some analyses of the ideational functions and interpersonal functions of evidentiality of COVID-19-related news discourse in the New York Times.The theoretical base is under the transitivity system and engagement system under the umbrella of Systemic Functional Linguistics.Based on Tang Bin’s(2007)and Yang Linxiu’s(2009)classification criteria of evidentials,evidentials in this thesis are reporting evidentials,inferring evidentials,sensory evidentials,and belief evidentials.This thesis collects 30 COVID-19-related news discourses in the New York Times from January 2020 to February 2022 as the monolingual self-built corpus.And then this corpus will be analyzed and calculated by the Ant Conc 3.5.9 software.By exploring the data under the framework of the Systemic Functional Linguistics,this thesis will try to work out the following questions:Firstly,what are the distribution and frequency of different evidentials in the COVID-19-related news discourses in the New York Times?Secondly,what are the ideational and interpersonal functions of evidentiality in the COVID-19-related news discourses in the New York Times?Thirdly,what attitudes or communicative goals are reflected by distinct evidentials in the COVID-19-related news discourses in the New York Times?The findings show that the four types of evidentials are spread unevenly throughout the Corpus.Reporting evidentials account for the biggest share,inferring evidentials come in second,sensory evidentials come in third,and belief evidentials come in last.The corpus of COVID-19-related news discourses in the New York Times has several lexicogrammatical realizations of evidentiality.This thesis investigates the ideational and interpersonal functions of evidentiality in the corpus using the transitivity structure and engagement system of Systemic Functional Linguistics.The transitivity structure is used in this thesis to analyze evidential sentences and investigate how empirical meaning is created.The ideational function of evidentiality shows that it can generate convincing knowledge by conveying empirical meaning through linguistic,mental,and relational processes.The engagement system in appraisal theory is used to analyze the interpersonal functions of evidentiality.The result demonstrates how evidentiality can foster heteroglossic communication.The speaker expands and contracts the discussion in this milieu,depending on the individual context.By examining evidentials in the COVID-19-related news discourses in the New York Times,this thesis will contribute to the development of evidentiality in terms of its theoretical expansion as well as its practical value in epidemic-related news discourse.Secondly,the study of evidentiality also helps to explore the real attitude of the speaker and the authenticity of the information.By analyzing the ideational and interpersonal functions of these evidentials,this study helps the speakers to achieve their communicative intentions in a more flexible way.Apart from this,this thesis can also help readers to cultivate critical thinking in news discourse.