A Corpus-based Contrastive Study On Evidentiality In English Research Articles Of Life Science By The Native And Chinese Scholars

This thesis is a corpus-based study. English RAs in the discipline of Life Science are chosen as the data to establish two small corpora. The English RAs by the native scholars are drawn from the American magazine Science, and the English RAs by Chinese scholars are from China’s Important Conference Papers in English from CNKI. Each corpus contains50English RAs and all the100English RAs are downloaded from official websites randomly and respectively.Based on the data, we conduct a contrastive study on the use of evidentiality in English RAs written by the native English scholars and the Chinese scholars. Specifically, we carry out the research on the distribution features of the types of evidentials and the frequencies of the specific lexical realizations for evidentiality adopted by the two groups of scholars and try to find the similarities and differences between them. And then the potential causes for the differences and how the specific evidentials influence the interpersonal function of evidentiality are tentatively analyzed.With the help of the software SPSS, Excel, Wordsmith5.0, we carry out the contrastive study on80items of the frequencies of evidentials used by the two groups of scholars. Our data primarily shows two aspects of differences:For one thing, there exists difference in the types of evidentials used by them. The native scholars prefer to make more use of inferring evidentianls while the Chinese scholars prefer to make more use of the specific quotatives. For another, the choices of the specific lexical realizations for evidentiality by the two groups of scholars are different. The native scholars more prefer to make use of these lexical realizations which are generally euphemistic, indirect or vague in meanings, such as suggest, could, might and so on; the Chinese scholars are more inclined to adopt those expressions which are less euphemistic, direct or more definite in meanings, such as can, report and so on. We might attribute the differences to the difference in cultures and modes of thinking, the mother tongue’s influence, the Chinese scholars’command of English etc. The evidentials adopted by our Chinese scholars make them bear higher responsibilities for the information source and these expressions might not be so favorable to establish a strongly persuasive interpersonal relationship in academic writing.By a series of qualitative and quantitative analysis, the study reveals the similarities and differences in the use of evidentiality in English RAs written by the native and Chinese scholars. Hopefully, this study offers good implications for the Chinese scholars’RA writing in English and for further foreign language teaching in our country.