A Contrastive Analysis Of Evidentiality In English And Chinese Commercial Advertising Discourses

Evidentiality has become a heated topic for linguists in recent years. Evidentiality concernssource of knowledge and the speaker’s commitment to reliability of knowledge. Since1980s,with the rising of functionalism, Chafe and other linguists enriched the study of evidentiality.They offer the broad sense of definition of evidentiality which concerns speaker’s attitudetowards information or knowledge as well as source of information. Meanwhile, Chinesescholars are committed to the introduction and study of evidentiality, including HuZhuanglin(1994,1995), Zhang Bojiang(1997), Niu Baoyi(2005), Zhu Yongsheng(2006) and FangHongmei(2006).Among these studies, Hu Zhuanglin makes great contributions on evidentiality in discourseanalysis. He makes analysis of evidentiality in news and debate, and concludes the features ofevidentiality in different discourse styles. In addition, Hu Zhuanglin manifests that evidentialityis an effective means in discourse analysis. Advertising discourse, as an important discourse, hasbeen studied for a long time. Advertising is the non-personal communication of informationusually paid for and usually persuasive in nature about products, services or ideas by identifiedsponsors through the various media. It has been studied from the approaches of stylistic,sociolinguistic, and systemic-functional. Evidentiality concerns source of information and thespeaker’s epistemic attitude towards information, so evidentiality has practical value for theanalysis of advertising discourse. However, few scholars pay attention to evidentiality inadvertising discourse. Most important, the advertising discourse offers a context for thespecification of evidentials. The paper will study evidentiality in advertising discourse and hopeto dig out the practical value of evidentiality in advertising.The paper selects50English commercial advertising discourses and50Chinese commercialadvertising discourses from newspapers and magazines respectively. Besides, the paper adoptsHu’s model as the framework and aims to find answers for the following questions:1. What are the general features of evidentiality in English and Chinese advertisingdiscourse?2. What are the similarities and differences in evidential use between English and Chineseadvertising discourse?3. What are the discourse features of evidentiality in English and Chinese advertisingdiscourse?The paper will combine quantitative and qualitative methods to analyze the collected data.First of all, the paper makes analyses of the general frequency and distribution of evidentials. Then the paper will make a detailed explanation of each category according to Hu’sclassification，and analyze different degrees of reliability of information. Different categorieshave different degrees of reliability of information, and different applications of evidentialitywould construct different discourse features. So it proves that evidentiality is an effective meansof discourse analysis.According to the study, first of all, advertising discourse has a low frequency of use ofevidentials. The distribution of evidentials in both kinds of advertisements is not even. Besides,zero evidential is used frequently in advertisements, which is a specific phenomenon inadvertising discourse. Then English and Chinese commercial advertising discourses sharesimilarities and difference. Modes of knowing of deduction and induction play an important partin the writing of advertising discourse. English evidentials have the counterparts in Chinese, andtheir evidentials are equivalent in meaning and function.The great difference lies in the adoptionof evidentials. The percentage of hypothesis/deduction in English advertisements is obviouslyhigher than that category in Chinese advertisements. The percentage of language/hearsayevidentials in Chinese advertisements is largely higher than that in English advertisements. Thechoice and adoption of evidentials reflect the discourse features of advertising discourse, whichare interactivity and objectivity.The paper aims to study evidentiality from the level of discourse and make comparativeanalysis between English advertisements and Chinese advertisements, and find out discoursefeatures of advertising discourse from the perspective of evidentiality. So it verifies thatevidentiality is an effective means in discourse analysis. The study of evidentiality contributes tothe analysis of advertising discourse and the public’s further understanding of advertisingdiscourse.