A Contrastive Study Of Evidentiality In English And Chinese Linguistics Book Reviews

This thesis examines the use of evidentiality in English Linguistics Book Reviews(henceforth EBRs)and Chinese Linguistics Book Reviews(henceforth CBRs).The phenomenon of evidentiality has become a hot research topic in linguistics.Though many scholars have studied evidentiality from different perspectives and lots of achievements have been made,there are still disagreements in many aspects.The previous studies on evidentiality have presented the following three characteristics.First,at the earlier stage of evidential research,many researchers pay more attention to the study of grammatical descriptions of evidentiality in some highly inflectional languages,while ignoring the lexical forms and contexts.Second,scholars have diverted their research attention of the studies of evidentiality to genre level,especially the academic discourse,but up to now academic book reviews have not attracted enough attention of researchers.Third,the review of the study on evidentiality in book reviews has shown that few researches on contrastive study of evidentiality in cross-languages have been conducted.And there are also few researches on evidentiality in the generic structure of book reviews.In view of the above characteristics of the previous researches,this thesis makes a contrastive study of evidentiality in English and Chinese linguistics book reviews.The study presents the similarities and differences of evidential systems in EBRs and CBRs,and discusses the influencing factors that would affect the choice of evidentials.This thesis consists of the following parts.First,in this thesis,we hold evidentiality as a semantic notion and different evidential markers are adopted to realize evidentiality.Taking other scholars' classifications of evidentiality and the special generic characteristics of book reviews into consideration,a classification of evidentiality in this study is first presented and then the potential lexicogrammatical forms of evidentiality in EBRs and CBRs.It is found that each evidential type can be realized by different lexicogrammatical forms in both EBRs and CBRs,which strengthen the nature of evidentiality as a semantic notion.Second,the statistic results show that both EBRs and CBRs contain a large number of evidentials,but the frequency of evidentials in EBRs is obviously higher than that in CBRs.We also find a significant difference:evidential realizations in EBRs are more complex than that in CBRs.Concerning the evidential type,book review writers prefer to employ reporting and inferring evidentials than sensory and belief evidentials in both EBRs and CBRs,and the most frequently used evidential type is reporting evidential.Third,in this thesis we also explore the information sources of reporting evidentials in both EBRs and CBRs.One of the primary functions of evidentiality is to indicate information sources.It is found that the highest proportion of information source is human specific source.Concerning other-reporting and self-reporting,the percentage of other-reporting take a dominance.This may related to the specific generic structure of book review for the main task of a reviewer is to introduce other writer's book to the potential readers.This thesis is significant in the study of evidentiality in academic book reviews.It offers the classification and lexicogrammatical forms of evidentials,which could give other researchers a better understanding of evidentiality.It also enriches the study of evidentiality in academic discourse.The similarities indicate that the semantics of evidentiality has universality in most of languages.The differences reveal that different cultural backgrounds may have influence on the choice of evidentials.