Study Of Evidentiality In English Economic News Reports

Evidentiality is a linguistic category which not only denotes how the reporter obtains the information, but also the reporter’s judgements of reliability toward the information. It can be achieved through grammar, lexical or other linguistic forms. Franz Boas(1911) studied the inflectional American Indian languages and found that some suffixes are used to show how the information is obtained and credibility of the information carried by the speakers’ expressions. Roman Jakobson(1957) first adopts the term evidential for the linguistic category. In the 1980 s, Hu Zhuanglin(1994) firstly introduced this concept into the domestic linguistic circle. Since then, more and more domestic scholars paid their attention to the study of evidentiality, such as Hu Zhuanglin(1994), Yan Chensong(2000), Xu Shenghuan(2004), Liao Qiaoyun(2004), Niu Baoyi(2005), Fang Hongmei(2006). In the previous evidentiality analysis, linguists mainly payed their attention to the English editorials, advertisements, political speeches etc. However, evidentiality studies on news reports, especially English economic news reports, are relatively rare, and it is necessary to study evidentiality in English economic news reports.In order to study how the communicative intentions is realized through evidentiality, 30 pieces of articles which are randomly chosen from China Daily’s official website. All the 30 pieces of articles are published between December of 2014 and June of 2015 and cover a wide range of fields like industry, finance, commerce, etc. This thesis trying to answer three questions: First, what are the features of evidentiality in English economic news? Second, what functions are embodied in evidentiality? Third, how these functions help the reporter to achieve the goal of persuading the prospective readers?Firstly, under the evidentiality theories, especially Hu Zhuanglin’ s definition and classification of evidentials, the features of evidentiality in English economic news are studied and explored from two aspects: the general frequency of evidentials and the distribution of each evidential type in English economic news. Secondly, based on the features of evidentiality in English economic news, its discourse features are explored. Thirdly, combined with the transitivity analysis in Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar, the functions embedded in evidentiality in English economic news can be probed. Finally, with all the results concluded before, how the persuasion goal is realized through the usage of evidentiality will be found.Compared with Hu Zhuanglin and Chafe’s researches, it can be seen that the average frequency of evidentials is 0.943 per sentence and it is relatively high. The distributions of each evidential type are shown: hearsay evidentials are mostly used, accounting for 44.34%, deduction occupies the second place, accounting for 36.14%, expectations covers a large proportion, accounting for 11.57%, reliability occupies 4.58%, induction accounts for 1.93%, while verbal resources covers the least proportion, only 1.45%. Secondly, the ideational and interpersonal functions of evidentiality in English economic news are explored from the frequency and distribution of each types of evidentials, the transitivity process, the information source and the role reporter plays. As the results shows, through the usage of evidentiality, the reporter construct himself as a an impartial objective information provider, and build-up of a power hierarchy in which both the outside information sources and the reporter himself are located higher than the common readership, and the results also shows that the evidentiality has the interpersonal function of avoiding some responsibilities for the reporter, establishing common sense with the readers and indicating the authenticity of information and the reporter, and all of these functions will make efforts to the process of covert persuasion.Through the analysis of evidentialty of English economic news reports, this paper provide a new prospective for future evidential studies. Besides, it also teaches readers to read English economic news reports in a critical manner.