A Contrastive Analysis Of Evidentiality In Chinese And American College Students' English Speeches

Public speaking plays an important role in social life.In political arena,it is a form of empowerment and leadership.In personal life,it brings sense of satisfaction and helps build one's confidence.Popular at home and abroad,English public speaking brings benefits to college students on many levels,academically,professionally and socially.It is especially conducive to Chinese college students' English study.Evidentiality as a language phenomenon was first noticed in the beginning of the 20^th century.The 1980 s has witnessed a dramatic progress in evidential studies abroad.Domestically,the study of evidentiality has been developing since 1990 s,but it is still in the initial stage and needs much improvement.English public speaking has long been studied from many perspectives.To date,however,few scholars have approached it from the perspective of evidentiality.Evidentiality is indispensable to English speeches in that it indicates the type of evidence and makes them more convincing.Therefore,it is necessary to make a study of evidentiality in English public speaking.This thesis makes a contrastive analysis of evidentiality in English speeches delivered by Chinese and American college students.This thesis adopts a broad definition and classification of evidentiality as the theoretical framework.In the broad sense,evidentiality refers to expressions of source of information as well as the speaker's commitment to the reliability of the information.Based on Hu Zhuanglin's modified model,evidentiality in this thesis is classified into six types: belief?cultural evidence?,induction?sensory evidence?,hearsay?language evidence?,deduction?hypothetic evidence?,reliability and expectation.The contrastive analysis of evidential features is aimed at providing implications for English speech teaching and delivering in China.By combining quantitative and qualitative methods,the thesis mainly aims to illuminate the following questions:?i?What is the general frequency of evidentials in Chinese and American college students' English speeches??ii?What are the distribution patterns of evidentials in the two corpora??iii?What are the similarities and differences of evidential use between the two corpora??iv?What are the discourse features of English speech reflected by the use of evidentials?The study collects 20 English speeches delivered by Chinese college students during the “FLTRP Cup” English Public Speaking Contest,and 20 English speeches delivered by American college students from Comments on English Speeches of American Students.The statistical analysis indicates that evidentials are densely distributed both in Chinese and American college students' English speeches,but the ratio of frequency is a little higher in the former than the latter.The distribution of the six types of evidentiality is not even in the two corpora.Expectation and deduction take the majority,hearsay,induction and reliability occupy the middle places,while belief is the least adopted.The differences between the distribution patterns are attributed to the speakers' competence of English,thought pattern as well as cultural differences.The two striking discourse features of English speech reflected by evidential use are credibility and interactivity.The contrastive study is of great significance.It is an application of evidentiality into practical discourse,which is hoped to develop English learners' awareness of evidentiality and provide implications on English speech teaching and delivering in China.