On Evidentiality In English News

Evidentiality is a new popular topic in linguistic field. During studying the American Indian languages, American Anthropologist Franz Boas found that some grammatical forms in some Indian languages could express the source of information or certainty degree of the utterance, and he reported this phenomenon in 1911. After that, this grammatical form (lexical form is also included in later studies) is called"evidentials", and this semantic category is called"evidentiality". In recent years, great progress has been made in evidentiality. Chafe's contrastive study on evidentiality between academic writing and English conversation provides the applied study of evidentiality with instruction in both theory and methodology. Hu's research on evidentiality in news and debating discourse more effectively combines evidentiality with discourse analysis.Eleven pieces of news ( including six pieces of hard news and five pieces of soft news) are selected from the website of American mainstream media such as Washington Post, New York Times, Associated Press as language data in order to analyze the evidentiality in English news, aiming at finding out (1) the features of evidentiality in English news; (2) the discourse features of English news reflected by the adoption of evidentials; (3) the differences between hard news and soft news in term of evidentiality.The analysis shows that, 0.57 evidentials per sentence are found in English news on average, and hearsay evidential accounts for a majority (64%) among all types of evidentials. Such features show the objectivity, accuracy and credibility of news. Certain differences are found between hard news and soft news in term of evidentiality. The frequency of evidentials in hard news is a little lower than in soft news. From distribution, hearsay evidential accounts for 91% in hard news, while the choice of evidentials in soft news is diverse. This shows that hard news is event-oriented, while the reporter's opinions and attitudes can be more involved in soft news.To sum up, through studying the evidentiality in news discourse, this thesis not only develops the application of evidentiality and broadens the study of news discourse, but also proves that evidential analysis of discourse can be adopted as an important means in discourse analysis. Therefore, this thesis promotes the development of evidentiality and news discourse research, and it also provides some reference to news writing.