| As a linguistic phenomenon,evidentiality refers to the source and reliability of information.American linguist Franz Boas(1911)was the pioneer to study evidentiality phenomenon in Handbook of American Indian languages.Domestic scholars made a series of achievements with the great interest in evidentiality phenomenon after it was introduced into China in the 1990 s by Hu Zhuanglin.However,most researchers of evidentiality have been carried out in English editorials,advertisements,academic discourses,political speeches,with little attention to the studies on evidentiality in English news discourse,especially from the perspective of Critical Discourse Analysis(CDA).This thesis attempts to study evidentiality in English news discourse within the framework of CDA.Drawing data from thirty news discourses in English newspapers of Washington Post,The Guardian and China Daily under the guidance of the theoretical framework of Halliday's Functional Grammar and Fairclough's three-dimensional method of CDA,and adopting Hu Zhuanglin's classification of evidentiality,this study aims to address the following questions with the help of Antconc 3.2.0 through three small self-bulit database corpora in a mixed method of quantitative and qualitative studies: the distribution and frequency of different evidentials in English news discourse,the functions of evidentials achieved in light of Halliday's Functional Grammar,and the relationship between ideology and power reflected through evidentiality in English news discourse from the perspective of CDA.Data analysis showed that,expressions of evidentiality totally appears 896 times,of which hearsay evidentials occupy the weightiness 28.2% of an average of 8.5 times per report,and are in the first place.The second evidential type is induction evidentials,which accounts for 21.5% with 6.4 times.The rest five evidential types are deduction,expectation,belief,reliability and verb resources,which fully demonstrates the objectivity and reliability in English news discourse.The distribution and frequency of the evidentials based on Halliday's Functional Grammar and Fairclough's three-dimensional method show that hearsay evidentials and belief evidentials realize ideational function;induction evidentials and reliability evidentials embody interpersonal function;and deduction evidentials and expectation evidentials are related to the textual function.This study holds that evidentialityin English news discourse reflects the relationship between ideology and power in three aspects: and the relationship between ideology and ideological power;the relationship between ideology and soft power;and the relationship between ideology and social power.This thesis concludes that evidentiality is interrelated with the ideology behind English news discourse by analyzing the distributions,frequencies and functions of the evidentials in news discourse.The results can help people better understand evidentiality in English news discourse.Furthermore,this study also offers some insights for readers regarding discourse judgment of different news texts from different countries and media,so as to cultivate a new critical reading capacity by revealing the relationship between ideology and power reflected through evidentiality in English news discourse. |
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