A Study On Evidentiality In Interpreted Discourse Of The Chinese Premier’s Press Conferences

Evidentiality refers to the phenomenon that the speaker uses some markers to indicate the source of information,at the same time the degree of credibility will be expressed.The lexical realization of evidentiality is evidential.Evidentiality has attracted the attention of domestic and foreign scholars in recent years.It is necessary to use evidentials to help people obtain information more accurately and effectively in communication,evaluate the source of information,and lay a foundation for smooth communication between the two sides.The study at discourse level has increased in recent years,but there are few researches in the interpreted discourse in press conferences.Therefore,this paper makes an analysis of the Premier’s answers to the journalists interpreted by interpreters at the Chinese Premier’s Press Conferences,aiming at analyzing the distribution of lexical realization of evidentiality in the discourse of the Chinese Premier’s Press Conferences,how evidentials of different categories construct subjectivity,and the pragmatic functions of different evidentials in the context.This study is an empirical research based on corpus,combined qualitative and quantitative analysis.Firstly,five years’ interpreted discourse was randomly selected from the corpus of interpreters’ speeches in the Chinese Premier’s Press Conferences from 2010 to2020,then form the theoretical basis.According to the broad definition of evidentiality,combining with the discourse characteristics of interpreted discourse in press conference,and Hu Zhuanglin’s classification of evidentiality,the evidentials are divided into belief evidential,reliability evidential,deductive evidential,induction evidential,evidential and hearsay evidential.According to the classification model and the analysis of the corpus,the data are annotated.Then import the corpus into the software Ant Conc 4.0.7 to build the corpus in order to analyze the data presented.It is found that the interpreted discourse in the Premier’s Press Conferences contains a great number of evidentials.The frequency of evidential types from high to low are deduction,reliability,belief,expectation,induction,and hearsay evidentials.Through the analysis of specific segments in the corpus,this research explains how the interpreter chooses evidentials to represent the subjectivity of high,medium and low values and the pragmatic functions they achieve in the discourse.The evidentials with high value of subjectivity embody the persuasion function and sharing function in context,the evidentials with medium of subjectivity embody the commitment function and sharing function in context,and the evidentials with low degree of subjectivity embody the pragmatic functions of authority,evaluation and interaction in context.In the realization of pragmatic functions,evidentials also achieve the legitimization of emotions,rationality,a hypothetical future and expert voice.This study is helpful for people to better understand evidentiality and verbal expressions of evidentiality in languages,providing a theoretical reference for interpreter’s use of evidentiality.It also helps people overcome the problem of expressing reliability in communication.