A Study Of Evidentials In English Advertising Discourses

The study on evidentiality can be traced back to 1911, when American linguist Franz Boas found that there was a kind of grammatical form to suggest the source of information and the degree of the certainty. In 1947, he specified "evidential" in his book Kwakitul Grammar for the very first time, since when the study of evidentiality got the definite term and began to be introduced into the linguistic field. The study on evidentiality has gained great progress during the past fifty years. Foreign scholars such as Willett, Aikhenvald, and Chafe have made great contributions to the definition of evidentiality and the classification of evidentials. Domestic scholars such as Hu Zhuanglin, Zhang Bojiang, Niu Baoyi and Fang Hongmei have done pioneer work for the introduction of evidentiality study to China. Through applying the theory of evidentiality to the analysis of news reports and debating discourse, Hu Zhuanglin gained the conclusion that evidential analysis could be used as an effective means for discourse analysis, and it also could show some features of the analyzed discourse, and hence he proved that evidential analysis could have practical value.Since the 1980s when evidentiality was studied from the perspective of functionalism, it has been one of the most discussed topics in linguistic field and applied to the studies of all languages in the world. Evidentiality mainly refers to the speaker's specification of the source of information/knowledge and/or the speaker's attitude towards information/knowledge, or say, the speaker's commitment to the reliability of information/knowledge. The expression of evidentiality on the level of grammar is called evidentials or evidential markers, which can be briefly divided into two categories:one is morphological markers, or morphological evidentials; the other is lexical markers, or lexical evidentials. The former mainly refers to prefixes and suffixes of verbs in some languages, while the latter mainly includes verbs, adverbs, adjectives, auxiliary verbs, adverbial phrases and so on. It is obvious that evidentials in English belong to the latter, which take the lexical forms.English advertising has been always the object for linguists. A huge number of mature studies on English advertising have been done, whether from its language or sentence patterns or functions. But it is still new to study it from the perspective of evidentiality. And since both evidentiality and advertising are interpersonal by nature, the evidentials in advertising discourses should have certain effects on the interpersonal function of advertisements.The first chapter is an introduction, briefly accounting the development and current situation of the studies of evidentiality, specifying the objectives as well as the organization of the thesis. Chapter Two is literature review, explaining the definition of evidentiality from the narrow sense and the broad sense, analyzing the classifications of evidentials made by different linguists, and introducing the meaning of interpersonal function, with the emphasis on modality. Chapter Three is the research design part, specifying the source of data and research methods, aiming at solving three questions:(1) the features of evidentiality in English advertising discourses; (2) the discourse features of advertising reflected by evidentiality; and (3) the effects of evidentiality on the interpersonal function of advertising discourses. Chapter Four is the core of the whole thesis, analyzing the data and giving answers to the research questions. Chapter Five is the conclusion, summarizing the major findings of this research, pointing out the implications and limitations, and suggesting the further study of evidentiality.On the basis of data analysis, three conclusions have been gained as follows:(1) Evidentials in English advertising discourse are of low frequency, which indicates that there are a great number of zero-evidential situations. As to the distribution of each category, hypothesis/deduction, expectation and sense/induction take relatively greater shares, accounting for 29.3%,28.8% and 21.1% respectively, while verbal resources, language/hearsay and culture/belief take relatively smaller share, accounting for 12.8%,4.8% and 3.2% respectively. Evidentials of each category show certain degrees of reliability.(2) According to the features of evidentiality in advertising discourses, especially the distribution of evidentials of each category, the discourse features of English advertising can be generalized as objectivity, inductivity and implicity.(3) Since evidentiality is interpersonal by nature, evidentials in advertising discourses do have effects on the interpersonal function of advertising discourses, which are summarized as negotiating interpersonal relations, creating reliability and shifting responsibility.Evidentiality is a relatively new topic in linguistics, and its application in the study of practical writing styles is even more initiative. By studying the evidentials in advertising discourses, this thesis not only provides a new area for the study on evidentiality and a new angle for the study on advertising discourses, but also verifies that the analysis of evidentiality can be used as a useful means in discourse analysis. Therefore, this thesis is of theoretical significance to the development of the studies on evidentiality as well as advertising discourses, and at the same time sheds some light on the practical writing of advertisements.