A Contrastive Study On Evidentiality In English And Chinese Research Articles Of Applied Linguistics

The research article(RA)is an important medium for communicating frontier research information and exchanging academic views in written form.As an important means of verbal evidence in academic discourse,evidentiality plays a unique role in conveying the objectivity,reliability and credibility of knowledge,and “how to write with evidence” is the core issue of evidentiality research in RAs.In view of the fact that most studies in the past have focused on evidentiality only in English academic discourse,and there is a lack of contrastive studies on evidential features in RAs across languages,this study aims to make a contrastive analysis of the cross-linguistic use of evidentials in English and Chinese RAs.In this study,RAs of applied linguistics are selected as the research objects,and a total of 60 RAs from six Chinese and English journals with high impact factors in 2019-2021 are randomly selected to establish two corpora.According to the traditional generic structures of RAs,the subcorpora of “Introduction”,“Methods”,“Results and Discussion” and “Conclusion” are then established respectively.This study intends to investigate the similarities and differences in the use of evidentials between Chinese and English RAs and to further examine their use in different sections of RAs.The study answers three questions: 1)What are the linguistic resources functioning as evidentials in Chinese and English RAs? 2)What are the similarities and differences in the use of evidentials in Chinese and English RAs? 3)What are the structural features of the use of evidentials in different sections of Chinese and English RAs? The main findings are as follows:(1)There are abundant evidential resources in both Chinese and English RAs,including four different types: reporting evidentials,inferring evidentials,sensory evidentials and belief evidentials.Among them,reporting evidentials mainly include(author+time),reporting verbs,nouns and adjuncts;inferring evidentials mainly include modal verbs,modal adverbs,adjective structures,relational processes and nouns;sensory evidentials mainly include visual verbs and auditory verbs,and belief evidentials mainly include mental verbs and adjuncts.These linguistic markers of evidentials are basically equivalent in the two corpora,but their sentence patterns and vocabulary diversities in English RAs are more complex than that in Chinese RAs.(2)In terms of total evidentials,there are statistically significant differences in the frequencies of the above four types of evidentials between Chinese and English RAs.The most frequently used evidentials in both corpora are reporting evidentials,followed by inferring evidentials and sensory evidentials,and finally belief evidentials.The distribution of different types of evidentials is extremely uneven in both corpora,which is reflected in the fact that the total proportion of reporting evidentials and inferring evidentials(93.30% in Chinese;91.54% in English)is much higher than that of sensory evidentials and belief evidentials(6.70%;8.46%).In terms of evidential types,the differences in the use of reporting verbs and information sources in reporting evidentials suggest that Chinese RAs employ more objective and neutral ways to state facts and present reader-responsible expression,while English RAs tend to show personal attitudes and positions based on facts and present writer-responsible expression.In inferring evidentials,both Chinese and English RAs rely heavily on modal verbs(85.34%;74.13%),especially low modal verbs,to express the writer’s adjustment of information certainty,but Chinese writers use less inferential relational processes,adjectives and nouns than English writers.In sensory evidentials,there is evidently more visual evidence(92.00%;75.68%)than auditory evidence(8.00%;24.32%)in both corpora,but the proportion of auditory evidentials in the English corpus is higher than that in the Chinese corpus.In belief evidentials,both Chinese and English writers prefer the subjective way(100%;75%)to explicitly convey their personal views.(3)There are also statistically significant differences in the occurrence of evidentials in different sections of Chinese and English RAs.As for the overall frequency of evidentials,English RAs use the most evidentials in the Conclusion section,while Chinese RAs use the most evidentials in the Introduction section.As for the distribution of the four types of evidentials,there are significant differences in the distribution of evidentials between sections in both Chinese and English RAs.However,by comparing Chinese and English RAs,it is found that there are no significant differences between them in the distribution of evidentials in the Methods and Conclusion sections,but very significant differences in the Introduction and Results and Discussion sections.The results of the study show that there are not only differences in evidential use between Chinese and English RAs of applied linguistics,which are mainly affected by the thinking pattern,writing style and research method,but also differences in the four sections Introduction,Methods,Results and Discussion and Conclusion,which are largely influenced by the rhetorical intention and communicative purpose of each section.It is hoped that this study could provide practical suggestions for the teaching of RA writing in both English and Chinese.