The Study Of Evidentiality Of Mandarin Chinese

The purpose of this study is to explore how the evidentiality of Mandarin Chinese is encoded, to study how Chinese speaker to indicate the information sources of their proposition by evidentials as well as their judgment to the reliability of proposition, to study the relationship between evidentiality and politeness in Mandarin Chinese.The main contents include: introduction of evidentiality theory and information territory theory. Study the relationship between modality and evidentiality. Review the literature of evidentiality. I get a model of evidentiality of Mandarin Chinese Based on the analysis of the corpus of Chinese oral utterance. Study the position which evidentiality of Mandarin Chinese in politeness theory.This method of this study is to analyze how the speaker and hearer to communicate information, how indicate the position of information in each other's information territory based on the corpus of natural speech in real life and TV talk shows. We divide the information which the sentences expressed into six types according to information territory theory and divide evidentials in Mandarin Chinese into eight types according to their function. We can find the regularity how Chinese speakers language to use evidentials by statistical analysis.Firstly, the data is analysed quantitativly in this desertation, and then we get a model of Chinese evidentiality. We found that when the speaker talks about information failed into his territory and he think that the hearer doesn't kown it, he often use 1 group evidentials. When the speaker talked about information fallen into his territory and he think that the hearer also known it, he often uses 1 and 2 group evidentials. When the speaker talks about information failed into both his territory and the hearer's territory, he often uses 4 group evidentials. When the hearer talked about information failed into the hearer's territory and he doen't kown, he often use 3 group evidentials. When the speaker talked about information failed into the hearer's territory and he also known it, he often use 3 and 6 group evidentials. When the speaker talked about information failed out of both his and the hearer's territory, he often uses 5,6,7,8 group evidentials.In this study we found that the knowledge of the speaker determines which type of evidential he will choose in Chinese. As a speaker, he known the topic, and is very sensitive to the knowledge of the hearer. He can indicate the extent to which he known the speaker's knowledge. The speaker could expand the hearer's information territory deliberately so as to include their own information. The speaker's purpose is to make the hearer think that they have shared information and common ground. The Speaker may seek the hearer's agree when they are talking. He wants the hearer to feel that he thinks that the hearer also have the knowledge of this information, and make the conversation between them very comfortable. Of course, the speaker may also make himself far away form the topic with indirect evidentials, make his information territory smaller. The speaker wants to be more polite by stressing that he is far away from the topic and the hearer is near to the topic. In this view, the main function of evidentials in Mandarin Chinese is to indicate the psychological distance between the topic and the speaker. Evidentiality seems to be a very useful polite strategy in Mandarin Chinese.