A Contrastive Study On Evidentiality In English Academic Discourses

In 1947,Franz Boas,an American anthropologist,first used the word “evidentiality” in Kwakiutl Grammar.After that,the study on evidentiality has attracted more and more attention in the field of linguistics.Evidentiality mainly refers to the speakers' explanation about the source and attitude of information.There are two forms of evidentiality:morphological evidentials and lexical evidentials.Morphological evidentials mainly refer to the prefixes and suffixes of verbs.Lexical evidentials refer to verbs,adjectives and adverbs.In recent years,the use of evidentiality in academic discourse has gradually become a research hotspot.The evidentiality in academic discourse is the cognitive coding of the source and reliability of information.The speaker can use the evidentials to express his/her attitude according to the communicative intention.It can not only help readers understand the author's purpose of discourse communication,but also provide the basis for readers to accept the view.Previous research has focused on cross-linguistic contrastive study,the study on evidentiary functions of specific parts of speech,and the study on evidentiary expressions in different discourse types(Chen,2014).However,research on applying evidentiality to contrast the features of English academic discourses has not been described systematically,and the research on applying evidentiality to contrast MA,PhD thesis for degrees and research papers in applied linguistics has also not been studied systematically.Based on the above research situation,this paper selected three linguistic journals from Elsevier Science and three universities from China Nation Knowledge Internet(CNKI).By using the principle of random sampling,40 MA,PhD theses for degrees and research papers by domestic and native scholars,as the corpora of this study,were selected from 2017 to 2019.The use of evidentials in the discourses was analyzed and contrasted.At the same time,T-test was adopted to contrast the frequency of the use of evidentials per 100 words.Through the contrastive analysis,there are some similarities and differences in the use of evidentials in MA,PhD theses for degrees and research papers by domestic and native scholars.First,the four types of evidentials(sensory evidential,reporting evidential,inferring evidential and belief evidential)are used more or less in MA,PhD theses for degrees and research papers by domestic and native scholars.Therefore,evidentiality is a common phenomenon in English research papers.Second,the frequency of the four types of evidentials per 100 words in MA student corpus,PhD student corpus,domestic scholar corpus and native scholar corpus is similar respectively(p=.745,.295,.275 and.082).Third,there are similarities in the use of evidentials in MA student corpus,PhD student corpus,domestic scholar corpus and native scholar corpus.On the one hand,reporting evidentials and inferring evidentials are employed far more than sensory evidentials and belief evidentials in the thesesand research papers.The percentage of reporting evidentials and inferring evidentials in each corpus is between 40% and 60% respectively,while the percentage of sensory evidentials and belief evidentials is less than 3% in each corpus respectively.On the other hand,in the four corpora,the percentage of evidentials is the highest in “Introduction section”,while the percentage of evidentials is the lowest in “Conclusion section”.In “Introduction section”,reporting evidentials take up the largest proportion.In “Data and Method section”,each type of evidential is not often used,the percentage of which is less than 11% in the four corpora respectively.The percentage of sensory evidentials and belief evidentials is even less than 1%respectively.Relatively,inferring evidentials are used more than other types of evidentials in this section.Fourth,there are differences in the use of evidentials between MA student corpus,PhD student corpus,domestic scholar corpus and native scholar corpus.On the one hand,MA and PhD students use reporting evidentials less frequently and inferring evidentials more frequently than domestic and native scholars.MA and PhD students tend to use inferring evidentials more often than domestic and native scholars,which indicates than MA and PhD students tend to use logical reasoning to present their findings.According to the data,PhD students are more likely to employ inferring evidentials than MA students in their writing.On the other hand,in “Results and Discussion section”,inferring evidentials take up the largest proportion in PhD student corpus,domestic scholar corpus and native scholar corpus.It can also be found than MA students use inferring evidentials in “Results and Discussion section”less frequently.On the one hand,this paper not only makes a contrastive analysis of the overall features of the use of evidentials in English MA,PhD theses for degrees and research papers by domestic and native scholars,but also makes a contrastive analysis of the features of the use of evidentials in each section of the targeted theses and research papers.It is found that the use of evidentials in each section of the targeted theses and research papers has its own features.On the other hand,the contrastive analysis of the use of evidentials in MA,PhD theses for degrees and research papers can help students improve their capacity in the writing.It can also help teachers realize students' weaknesses in the process of analyzing the features of students' English writing.So teachers can guide students how to use evidentials correctly.