| According to positivism,academic writing should be objective,neutral,and impersonal.However,more and more researches argue that academic writing is also an activity of interaction and negotiation between the writer and the reader.The writer interacts with the reader and constructs authorial identity through diverse linguistic devices.Evidentiality which involves not only where the information comes from but also the stance and attitudes the speaker assumes is a kind of discourse strategy which can perform the authorial identity construction interpersonal function.However,the study on authorial identity construction from the perspective of evidentiality is few.Meanwhile,although there are many studies have touched features of applying evidentiality in academic discourses.Previous studies mainly focus on the comparative researches of evidentiality in English and Chinese journal articles or journal articles of different disciplines.At present,the study on evidentiality and its authorial identity construction function in English linguistics MA Degree theses is rare.Out of the above considerations,this thesis aims to present a comprehensive picture of the evidentiality usage and its interpersonal functions of authorial identity construction in English Linguistics Master theses.The following questions will be addressed in this study:1.What are the features of evidentiality in MA Degree theses of English linguistics ?2.How is the authorial identity constructed through the choice of evidentials in MA Degree theses of English linguistics ?To answer the above questions,the author built English Linguistics Master theses corpus(ELM)and four sub-corpora(ELM-I,ELM-M,ELM-R,ELM-C).The selected data which include 21 English Linguistics Master theses are all collected from the China National Knowledge Infrastructure database(CNKI).At the same time,all collected articles are selected from first-class disciplines construction university in China.The total word number of the self-built corpora is 317,321.Importantly,The sub-categories of evidentials are manually annotated according to Yang(2009)’s classification.Meanwhile,research data are analyzed by AntConc(version 3.5.0.0)and Stata(version 14.0.0.0)in order to present the frequency and distribution of evidentials in the whole passage and the different generic structures.At last,analyses are conducted to clarify how do writers construct authorial identity through evidentiality.The results demonstrate that postgraduate students in English linguistics adopt different evidential types and lexical realizations to construct their authorial identity.In the corpora,we found there are four kinds of evidentials which include reporting evidentials,inferring evidentials,sensory evidentials,and belief evidentials.Besides,the distribution of four different kinds of evidentials in English linguistics MA Degree theses is discrepant.It’s found that the occupancy of inferring evidentials and reporting evidentials account for the major portion of all evidentials.While belief evidentials and sensory evidentials only account for a small part.Additionally,the generic structures of MA Degree theses influence the writer’s choice of evidentiality.The distribution of evidentiality in method and results & discussion part present similarity.However,there are very significant differences between other generic sections of MA Degree theses and evidentiality.Meanwhile,The present study has also found that as a discourse strategy,evidentiality can realize the interpersonal function of authorial identity construction.For example,the use of sensory evidentials and inferring evidentials can increase the credibility of the article.The use of self-reporting evidentials and belief evidentials can be used to help establish the author’s authority.And by choosing belief evidentials and sensory evidentials,the author’s solidarity with the reader is acquired. |
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