Reporting Evidentials In Generic Structures Of English Research Articles:From The Perspective Of Engagement

This thesis aims to examine reporting evidentials in different generic structures of English research articles(RAs)from the perspective of Engagement.In spite of the recent surge of studies on "reporting" "citation" and "reporting verbs" and the achievements made in previous related evidential researches,the studies on "reporting evidentials"are rather deficient.Compared with the previous studies,this thesis has the following advantages.First,the semantic scope of evidentiality enables "reporting evidentials" to contain more semantic dimensions and richer research contents than "reporting" "citation" and "reporting verbs".The study of reporting evidentials concerns the way of reporting,the source of reported information and the effects of different lexicogrammatical realizations of reporting evidentials.Second,the review of the research on English RAs has shown that few researches on reporting evidentials and the generic structures of RAs have been conducted.Therefore,it is meaningful to combine reporting evidentials with the generic structures of English RAs and explore how the adoption of reporting evidentials affects the writer's endeavor to make alliance between the writer and the reader and how the writer's view can be better presented in each generic structures of RAs.This thesis integrates Swales' generic structural model with Martin&White's Engagement system and selects 120 research articles of different disciplines randomly from English journals to set up a corpus.By the processing methods on data such as manual work of tagging,using computer software like Antconc and doing Chi-square test,this study demonstrates the differences of Engagement resources in four generic structures of RAs from the perspective of lexicogrammatical realizations and information sources.The study has engendered following findings.The specific types of reporting evidentials with different information sources are distributed differently in four generic structures of RAs.In the section of Introduction,the number of "Author + date" is the biggest.Reporting verbs and nouns are most frequently adopted in the sections of Result&Discussion and Conclusion.The contrast ratios between self-reporting and other-reporting are different in different generic structures.In the section of Introduction,the frequency of other-reporting is far more than that of self-reporting.However,in the latter sections,the gap narrows significantly.In Introduction part of RAs,writers are likely to use more dialogic expansive reporting evidentials and spare space for alternative positions to show the objectivity of the research and the engagement of readers as participants.At the latter parts of RAs,especially in the sections of Conclusion and Result&Discussion,writers tend to display their explicit attitudes towards persuasion by numerous dialogic contractive reporting evidentials.To be specific,different generic structures have different distributions of reporting evidential types and information sources.Such various reporting evidential types with various information sources are employed to realize different aspects of dialogism in different generic structures of RAs.In sum,different generic structures prefer particular types of reporting evidentials,and some types of reporting evidentials tend to occur more frequently in certain generic structures.The interdependent relationship between reporting evidentials and generic structures reveals that the various communicative purposes of each part will influence the adoption of reporting evidentials and the use of reporting evidentials will in turn strengthen the communicative purposes.This study may enrich the study of evidentiality in academic discourses.The findings of the study have guiding functions for research article writers.It is hoped to raise the RA writers'functional awareness of using reporting evidentials,so as to achieve the persuasive function by selecting proper reporting evidentials.