Evidentiality In Chinese Lawyers' Statements: A Pragmatic Approach

This thesis's objective was to shed some light on the pragmatic effects that evidential have on the persuasiveness of Chinese lawyers' statements. By a descriptive methodology, the prevalence and variability of evidentials were worked out. Then, on the basis of Verschueren's Adaptation Theory and Chafe's theory of evidentiality, the motivations of using evidentials and their interpretation process were elaborated.It has been found that, firstly, evidentials prevail in Chinese lawyers' statements, and the percentage of propositions with evidentials is no less than 47.2% and can be up to 76.8% in a statement. Furthermore, the forms of evidentials spread widely over the five syntactic structures, namely, morpheme, word, phrase, clause, and sentence, so it can be concluded that evidentials are not grammaticalized in the Chinese language. Secondly, the use of evidentiality is motivated by such contextual correlates as physical, social, and mental world concerned in the institutional setting of statement writing. Finally, it has been found that, by using evidentials in a statement, the reliability and persuasiveness of information can be stressed, either strengthened for defending one's own opinion or degraded for opposing the counterpart's in a lawsuit.Therefore, this thesis has drawn the conclusion that evidentials are prevalently adopted in Chinese lawyers' statements for their positive pragmatic effects on the expression of a lawyer's attitude towards opinion, so that to use evidentials appropriately is of importance to the persuasiveness of a statement.