A Comparative Study On Evidentiality In Chinese And English News About International Relationship

Evidentiality has become an attractive research phenomenon for linguists in recent years.Evidentiality is mainly about the speakers'attitude towards or commitment to knowledge,statements of the source of knowledge.In China,great achievements have already made in the field of linguistic study of evidentiality.Research on evidentiality has expanded from introduction to other perspectives.Researchers unit form and function in the study of evidentiality.The evidentiality of Chinese discourse has attracted more attention.In the early stage,researchers concentrated on grammatical description of evidentiality based on highly inflectional languages.Later,though scholars diverted their research interests to lexical and syntactic level,showing a clear tendency to discourse level,types of discourse in these studies is homogenized,especially academic discourse.Studies on journalistic discourse has not attracted enough attention.Given the deficiency of previous study,this thesis conducts a survey on evidentiality in English and Chinese news about international relationships.This thesis is intended to show similarities and differences between English and Chinese discourse in application of different types of evidentials.Based on corpus,this thesis conducts an empirical survey,adopting corpus analysis and comparative study.The whole process of this research could be divided into three main steps.In the first stage,theoretical framework should be established in the guidance of a broad approach toward evidentiality.Taking characteristics of journalistic discourse about international relationships into consideration,this thesis divided evidentials into hearsay,belief,reliability,induction,deduction and expectation.In the second stage,linguistic data should be collected and described.This paper adopts random sampling to collect 100 pieces of news about international relationships from New York Times and Global Times published from 1^st,Sept 2017 to1^st,Sept 2018?50 pieces for each?.Then,based on the interpretation and classification of evidentiality adopted by this thesis,the linguistic data would be labeled and marked at the help of AntConc 3.5.7?Windows?2018.A corpus with two sub-corpora could be built to assist in data statistics to find out similarities and differences in application of evidentials in Chinese and English journalistic discourse about international relationships.In the third stage,this study explores factors behind these differences from the perspectives of,cultural differences,linguistic factor,political and economic policy.Major findings of this study could be concluded as fellows:1)Evidentiality is widely existed both in Chinese and English discourse.But New York Times applies more evidential markers than Global Times in general.2)The distributions of six types of evidentials are extremely unbalanced in both sub-copra.hearsay ranks the highest in frequency in both sub-copra with a percentage of more than 50%.While induction ranks the lowest in frequency.3)The six types of evidentials in English discourses could be sorted by frequency as follows:hearsay,deduction,reliability,belief,expectation and induction.While Chinese material is hearsay,reliability,belief,deduction,expectation and induction.Comparing to a higher frequency in using reliability and belief in Global Times,the New York Times possesses a higher frequency in the application of deduction and expectation.4)The New York Times and Global Times present both similarities and differences in specific linguistic realizations in six types of evidentials.5)The factors that result in those differences could be concluded as:cultural differences,linguistic factor,political policy and economic policy.