A Comparative Analysis Of Evidentiality In Comtemporary Chinese Novelle And Interviews

Evidentiality indicates the source of the said information or knowledge and the attitude of the speaker towards the reliability of the information or knowledge. The extensive study on the evidentiality started in 1980s and now it has become an indispensable research subject in the field of linguistics.At home, some scholars also introduce and study issues about the evidentiality. It has been studied from different perspectives such as typology, grammaticalization, cognitive linguistics, syntax and pragmatics, etc. But studies on evidentiality in different genres are not too many relatively, especially on Chinese evidentialiy. Evidentiality is sensitive to genres and different features of evidentiality usage in different genres are presented.This thesis mainly makes a comparative analysis on the distribution regularities and usage difference of evidentiality in two different genres (Chinese short-medium novelle and interviews), and analyzes related reasons, and at the same time, makes a conclusion about the pragmatic functions of evidentiality.The methodology in this thesis:based on the previous studies on the evidentiality, with the help of corpus research approach, this thesis makes a qualitative and quantitative analysis on the distribution of evidential expressions in the short-medium novel and interview, classifies contemporary Chinese evidential expressions into seven types mainly on the base of Hu Zhuanglin’s revision model, sets up the corpus of contemporary Chinese short-medium novel and interview, and adopts Microsoft Visual FoxPro 9.0 to obtain the related data about the distribution of evidential expressions and then the qualitative analysis is made after the quantitative analysis.The research result in this thesis indicates that all seven types of evidential expressions are distributed in these two genres and the distribution is different in different genres. The evidentiality distributions in these two genres have differences and similarities. The distribution difference is directly related to the genre feature and helps to realize different discourse features and functions. The usage of evidentiality in these two genres presents three main pragmatic functions:helping to provide true and accurate information; reducing or avoiding personal responsibility; and harmonizing or maintaining the interpersonal relationship. All evidential expressions are firstly used for the first function in the novel and in the interview, and frequency of two other functions in the interview is higher than in the novel. The author hopes that this research can a certain contribution to broadening the study on evidentiality, improving language learners’ awareness of the importance of evidentiality and especially strengthening the emphasis on the study of contemporary Chinese evidentiality.