| Academic writing has been traditionally viewed as objective and neutral,thus personal stance should be avoided.However,more and more researches suggest that academic writing is a kind of academic interaction and communication between the writer and reader.The writer interacts with readers and constructs authorial identity through diverse linguistic devices.More and more attention is paid to the study of authorial identity construction in academic writing.Nevertheless,the comparative study of identity construction in Chinese and English academic writing is few.So far scarce studies have been conducted on authorial identity construction in English and Chinese research article(RA)introductions from the perspective of evidentiality.This paper constructs a corpus of 80 RA introductions(40 in Chinese and English respectively)in the field of applied linguistics,which are published in the core journals from2012-2015.According to Yang(2009)'s classification of evidentiality,the paper aims to address the following questions:(1)What are the characteristics of evidentiality in Chinese and English RA introductions?(2)How do writers construct their authorial identity through evidentiality in RA introductions? And are there any differences in authorial identity construction between Chinese and English writers? If any,what are they?(3)What are the possible influencing factors of the construction of authorial identity ?To answer the above questions,the author firstly annotates all potential evidential markers automatically and then calculates the occurrences and frequencies of evidentials per 1000 words with the software of AntConc 3.3,BFSU Likelihood and Chi-square Calculator 1.0.At last,the different employments of evidential types and lexical realizations in English and Chinese RA introductions are compared,the characteristics of authorial identity construction across cultures are reflected,and the possible influencing factors of these differences are revealed.The results demonstrate that both English and Chinese writers adopt different evidential types and lexical realizations to construct their authorial identity.The distribution of three subcategories of evidentiality shares the same pattern in both corpora.Nevertheless,there are great disparities between English and Chinese RA writers in the selection of different evidentials.Firstly,the overall occurrence of evidentiality in Chinese introductions is lower than that in English introductions.In addition,the English writers make a balanced use of reporting and inferring evidentials.However,the Chinese writers are inclined to use more reporting evidentials.Furthermore,the differences also exist in the choice of realization forms and lexical markers.The Chinese writers prefer to choose the forms that are objective,without personal evaluationand lexical realizations with high degree of commitment.The English writers tend to employ various realization forms and the expressions with dialogic space.The characteristics of evidentiality in the two corpora reflect different ways of identity construction.Firstly,the English writers are flexible to use different lexical realizations to guide readers in the text,viewing the text as a way to communicate with readers and anticipating the readers' response.Through various evidentials,they are flexible to shift or share the responsibility for the presented information,achieve solidarity with readers and establish authorial identity in the discourse,presenting an image of discourse constructor.Nevertheless,the Chinese writers prefer to make a list of prior researchers without personal evaluations.They consider the text as a way to state facts,paying more attention to the credibility of the statement and hiding their own opinions towards the information.With different evidentials,they strengthen the credibility of the information and construct individual authoritativeness,projecting an image as an academic researcher.The possible influencing factors of these differences on identity construction can be attributed to culture conventions and writers' different perceptions of evidentiality.This paper provides a new perspective to authorial identity construction in RA introductions.In academic discourse,the writer can adopt different evidentials to express information sources as well as their opinions,projecting different authorial identities.Besides,it sheds light on the understanding of interpersonal functions of evidentiality,helping writers elevate writing abilities. |
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