An Analysis Of Distribution Features Of Evidentiality In Different Genres

Evidentiality refers to the speaker's expression about the source of information/knowledge and /or the speaker's assessment of the reliability of that information/knowledge. It is an important language device. Evidentiality concerns both where the information comes from and the responsibility the speaker assumes. Research into evidentiality abroad develops fast and has become an essential topic in linguistic field. In China, many scholars have paid attention to evidentiality and have made some introductions and applications. Moreover, genre analysis has been studied from the perspectives of systemic linguistics, metaphor, metadiscourse and hedges, but it has not been studied from evidentiality. Evidentiality is genre sensitive and the use of evidentiality reveals different genre features. This thesis is to find out the distribution regularities of six kinds of evidentiality in different genres and analyze the reasons.Based on studies on evidentiality and genre analysis theory and with a corpus-based methodology, this thesis makes a quantitative and qualitative analysis of evidential use in four genres. According to the revised model by Hu (1994a), evidentials are classified into six types. Then four corpora of presidential debate, interview, editorial and research article are set up. The corresponding coding system is also set up and evidentials used in the four genres are thoroughly annotated. By means of the tool of Corcord300, the distribution regularities of hedging are summarized. After the quantitative analysis, qualitative analysis is made.The analysis reveals that all the six kinds of evidentials have some distributions in the four genres. In presidential debates and interviews, the distributions of evidentials are relatively even while in editorials and research articles, there are considerable differences in the distributions. Furthermore, evidential distribution varies across moves in each genre. Evidentials used in spoken texts are much more than those in written texts. The above distribution features are related to different genre features of the four genres and different semantic distribution features and they help to realize genre features. Three pragmatic functions can be achieved when evidentials are used in genres: some evidentials can help provide accurate information; some evidentials can make words sound more polite; another function is to protect the speaker and reduce his responsibility. It is hoped that the findings in this thesis will be helpful to broaden the study of evidentiality, enhance the evidentiality awareness of writers and their ability of applying evidentials and provide some implications for English teaching and writing.