| The goal of this dissertation is to discover the covert indexical system of evidentiality in English scientific discourse. It elucidates and describes the system of expressions and forms that index evidential-like meanings in 1970s cellular immunology research articles that investigate T-cell functional heterogeneity.; Chapter One establishes a connection between features of grammaticalized evidential systems on the one hand, and sociological generalizations about the nature of scientific discourse and its ideologies, on the other. Because this research proposes that evidentials are indexical in nature, an investigation of the forms and expressions that index evidentiality in English scientific discourse is prefaced by an analysis of the culture of cellular immunology in the 1970s in general, and the line of investigation that involved T-cell functional heterogeneity in particular. The emergent social structure of this research area is characterized in terms of the citation practices of a corpus of 1,000 research articles, and 21 sociocitational networks in Chapter Two offer a graphical depiction of the social, technical, and citational landscape of this period and of this discovery.; The evidential structure of the research papers in our corpus is modeled in Chapter Three. Specific combinations of linguistic and discursive features are shown to cue regularly-occurring epistemic stances regarding the facticity of predicated knowledge claims. This default evidential structure is argued to facilitate the establishment of four epistemic warrants crucially involved in scientific argument. However, in service of the particular arguments they are making, and according to their specific contexts, papers articulate these evidential-like warrants differently, and realize the default evidential model differently. Thus, Chapter Four offers an in-depth analysis of two articles, analyzing their discursive regularities in light of the Chapter Three model, and with respect to the sociocitational networks in which they appeared in Chapter Two. The concluding Chapter Five offers some implications about the preceding chapters' observations about textual evidentiality for the grammar/discourse divide, and considers avenues for future research into evidentiality in English and beyond. |
