A Study Of Evidentiality In Hillary Clinton’s Political Speeches

Evidentiality is a semantic category which can not only indicate the source of information but also the attitudes toward information. The research of evidentiality not only benefit for the reorganization and understanding of the nature of language, but also the important and effective method to analyze discourse analysis. In addition, different texts have different styles whose evidentiality will present totally different. The thesis focuses on the Hillary’s political speeches in order to study the presentation of evidentiality in political speeches. Based on the development and history of evidentiality, the thesis has three reasons to choose this subject.Firstly, different from other historic research topics, Evidentiality has a shorter history time. Relatively speaking, it has become a quite new and hot issue these years and been used in a very wide variety of languages.Secondly, previous studies mostly were focused on research papers, reports, news articles and other types of advertising, but few on political speeches. But researches on evidentiality about political speeches are meaningful and significant, so the paper selected political speeches as discourse research.Thirdly, Hillary Clinton, as a female politician and speaker can be described as the hottest new leader these years. From the first lady, the New York senator and Democratic presidential candidate, US Secretary of State, she uses her unique affinity for presentation to the get most support of the American people. Using the perfect skills is one of the most important reasons that female speaker can be so well received. Evidentiality reflects in political speeches everywhere and could help us understand the charming speech skills better.This article will use a combination of quantitative and qualitative study to explore the evidentiality in Hillary’s political speeches including whether evidentiality affect the political speeches, what about the percentage of every part of evidentality, which part has the biggest percentage to influence the political speeches. Chapter 1 will introduce the origin of evidentiality and the development of evidentiality inside China and abroad although it does not have a long history. And Chapter 2 presents the development and history of political speeches, and focuses on the current condition and development of Hillary’s political speeches in detail. As for the Chapter 3, it introduces the definition and classification. Since so many scholars have done the research about evidentiality from different perspective and method, the thesis is mainly on the interpersonal functions. At the same time, according to the proportion of digital corpus obtained, it can promote interpersonal communication and improve speaking skills. Chapter 4 is the core chapter in the thesis. The author collects 16 pieces of Hillary’s political speeches(about 150 thousand words) to analyze the evidentiality in her political speeches carefully. Based on the scholar Chafe and others, the author divides evidentials into implicit evidentials and explicit evidentials(explicit evidentials include sensory evidentials, reporting evidentials, inferring evidentials and belief evidentials). And the author analyses every evidentials and its expression. The key point of the thesis is on the interpersonal functions and the author analyzes the persuasive functions, interactive functions and evaluative functions of evidentiality in Hillary’s political speeches. Thus, it comes out a conclusion that the speaker/writer will choose different evidentials to achieve his/her purposes according to the context. And Chapter 5 is mainly to analyze the data of Hillary’s political speeches. By analyzing the percentages of sensory evidentials, reporting evidentials, inferring evidentials and belief evidentials, the author will find the functions and influences of every evidentials which will promote the strategies in communication and conversation, the speaking strategies, speech writing and learning in the future. Through the analysis about influences and functions the different kinds of evidentials have, it will provide the opportunity to develop people’s language ability and understand language better. The analysis of evidential not only has the theoretical meaning but also the practical meaning. It cannot be replaced in political speeches.