Modern Chinese Substantiated Its Performance

Evidentiality proves to be an indispensable syntactic-semantic category in some human languages. It is defined as a certain source of information together with the speaker's evaluation of the source's credibility. There should be no language that has no means to encode evidentiality, and words as well as constructions expressing evidentiality are referred to as 'evidentials'.This thesis focuses on the evidentiality displayed in modern Chinese, so as to reveal the mapping relations between the information source as well as the Chinese speaker's evaluation and the linguistic encoding. Composed of 8 sections, this thesis involves discussions on 6 evidentials, covering active and passive information source markers, credibility markers and their performances in terms of syntax, semantics and pragmatics.Section 1 'Introduction' first provides a brief review on the* current research in the aspect of evidentiality. And then on the basis of our understanding, the theoretic frame of evidentiality that is kept to throughout the thesis is described.Section 2 and Section 3 discuss two active information source markers. The former takes xiangxin 'believe' as an illustration of the prerequisites when a mental/perceptive verb used as an evidential and its consequent change in syntax. Gaobuhao 'badly done' is discussed in Section 3 to reconstruct the syntactic environment and path for the grammaticalisation of some type of evidentials and the functional explanations for its shift in meaning as well.Section 4 and Section 5 are mainly focused on two passive information source markers. The topic of Section 4 is a quotation marker shuoshi 'it is said that', with a purpose to unveil its characteristics in meaning and syntactic performances. Section 5 gives a discussion on an example shifting from a quotation marker to a mood marker in Shanghai dialect, which may be taken as a representative of development of quotation markers in Chinese.We take the credibility marker ba into consideration in Section 6. The viewpoint that ba expresses a less-weaker credibility is proved to be effective to give a unified interpretation for its multiple uses. The discussion of Section 7 commences with the syntactic-semantic limitations of adjectives used as predicates. The inbeing of the contrasting activity and de's function of expressing evidentiality make the point clear that the limitation of adjectives used as predicates is a result of the qualification in regards of evidentiality, from which one can come to the conclusion that there is in some degree a compulsory requirement in expressing evidentiality even in Chinese.Section 8 'Summary' restates the viewpoints in this thesis and gives a list of questions for further discussion.