| In the 20 th century,evidentiality has aroused the concern of native English scholars and Chinese scholars.Aikhenvald(2003)holds the view that evidentiality is a linguistic category whose primary meaning is source of information.Chafe(1986),from the abroad perspective,defines evidentiality as “marking speaker’s attitude towards his or her knowledge of reality”.It is widely accepted that evidentiality,not only explains the information source,but the attitude and commitment to the given information.As Fang(2005)claimed,the interpersonal function of evidential is to help authors bear fewer responsibilities in research papers,by creating and leaving a distance between the given information and the authors.Previous studies on evidentiality focused on the introduction,classification and discussion of the nature of evidentiality.The use of evidentials in different discourses arouses the attention of researches.However,few researches have been done on the use of evidentials in MA dissertations at home and abroad.The present research,based on the theory of evidentiality by Yang Linxiu(2009),analyzes 40 MA dissertations written by native English students and Chinese English learners in the field of linguistics.Two corpora have been built to compare the use of evidentiality in Master’s Dissertations written by the two groups of students.The thesis,with the help of Antconc3.2.1 and Excel,by displaying the frequencies per thousands words of four evidentials and their realizations,aims to explore the differences in MA dissertations written by native English students and Chinese learners in their selections of lexical realizations and evidentials.The thesis is mainly to answer three questions below:1.How do the evidentials distribute in the MA dissertations of native English students and Chinese students? What are the similarities and differences?2.What are the realizations of four types of evidentiality in the MA dissertations of native and Chinese students? What are the similarities and differences?3.What are the possible reasons for these differences?Data analysis and discussion indicate:1.As for the distributions of types of evidentials,the similarities dissertations of both corpora are that the frequencies of reporting and inferring evidentials are relatively high.The differences are that native English students tend to use more referring evidentials and belief evidentials and Chinese students are inclined to use reporting evidentials.2.In terms of realizations and differences of native English students and Chinese students,native students are inclined to use the expressions of “see+noun”,like see figure,see section,see table,see appendix,from the perspective of sensory evidentials.When reporting information,native English students tend to use the verb “suggest” while Chinese students tend to use “show”.In expressing the ideas or thoughts,Chinese students prefer to the verb“claim” while the native students use “argue” more frequently.As for the modal verb,“can”“should” “will” are most frequently used by Chinese students,while native English students are inclined to use “may” ”could” “might” “would”.3.As a whole,native English students tend to use various realizations and use proper words bearing fewer responsibilities while the foreign language learners use the common phrases and choose the words taking more responsibilities,which might be out of interlanguage,different thinking mode,the interpersonal function the evidential plays,or the genre of master dissertations.Through the qualitative and quantitative analysis,the thesis displays the differences between second language learners and native English students from the perspective of the evidentiality relatively and objectively,and infers some corresponding reasons,which to some extent provides some valuable references for the language learners in the aspect of writing the academic papers and for the language teaching and learning as well. |
