A Contrastive Study On Evidentiality In English And Chinese Journalistic Texts

Evidentiality is a linguistic category which is about the speaker's expression of source of information and his commitment to the reliability of information. The linguistic forms of evidentiality are termed as evidentials or evidential markers. This linguistic phenomenon began to attract linguists'attention in the early part of the 20th century. In studying the American Indian languages, American anthropologist Franz Boas found that some grammatical forms in certain Indian languages could express the source of information or certainty degree of the utterance, and he reported this phenomenon in 1911. Roman Jakobson (1957) first adopts the term "evidential". Ever since the 1980s, the research on evidentiality made a dramatic progress, which is mainly about inflectional languages.Domestically, this topic has been studied since the 1990s. Domestic researches can be classified into four types:introduction, evidential analysis in Chinese, application and reanalysis of the nature of evidentiality. Meanwhile, the discourse features of evidentiality have already begun to attract the attention of linguistic experts and researchers. Chafe's contrastive study on evidentiality between academic writing and English conversation (Chafe,1986) provides the applied study of evidentiality with instruction in both theory and methodology. Hu's research on evidentiality in news and debating discourse (Hu Zhuanglin,1995) effectively combines evidentiality with discourse analysis. But as a whole, domestic research in this area is still in infancy and thus needs further improvement and supplementation.In the current study,40 pieces of news are selected from New York Times and People' Daily (20 pieces for each, with 10 hard news and 10 soft news) as language data for the contrastive study on evidentiality between English and Chinese journalistic texts. This thesis is a combination of a quantitative study and a qualitative study, aiming at illuminating:(â…°) the frequency and distribution of evidential types in English and Chinese journalistic texts; (â…±) the discourse features of journalistic texts reflected by the use of evidentials; (â…²) the similarities and differences of the use of evidentials between two languages; (â…³) the factors resulting in these differences. Through the analysis, we found that the hearsay evidentials accounts for a majority among all types of evidentials. This shows the objectivity and credibility of journalistic texts. The average frequency of evidentials is higher in English journalistic texts than that in Chinese ones. From distribution, the percentage of inferential evidentials in Chinese soft news is higher than that in English ones, while the belief evidentials is lower. Besides, the hearsay evidentials in Chinese is obviously higher than that in English ones. The timeliness of news, thought patterns and newspaper's value can influence the journalists'choice of evidentials in writing news.Through a contrastive study on evidentiality in English and Chinese journalistic texts, this thesis not only develops the application of evidentiality and broadens the study of journalistic texts, but also proves that evidentiality is universal with slight differences between different languages. This thesis is also expected to throw some light on news writing and reading.