Evidentiality In Research Article Abstracts

This study compares the use of evidentiality in English and Chinese research article(RA in the following)abstracts in four disciplines in order to explore whether different cultural and disciplinary background of RA writers influence their evidential choice in abstracts writing.Evidentiality,as a pervasive linguistic phenomenon,has attracted the attention of scholars and many achievements have been made,but there are still many perspectives that remain to be explored further.The previous evidential researches have the following characteristics.Firstly,most of the previous studies take evidentiality as a grammatical notion and focus on the exploration of the grammatical or formal aspects of evidentiality in highly inflectional languages without taking the forms other than grammatical ones into consideration.Secondly,although evidentiality in academic discourse has attracted the attention of scholars recently,the abstracts,as important and inseparable parts of RAs,have been somewhat ignored.Few studies are conducted on the exploration of evidentiality in abstracts.Thirdly,there are few systematic descriptions of linguistic realizations of evidentiality,especially evidentials in Chinese.In addition,there are few researches on cross-disciplinary and cross-linguistic evidential use in RA abstracts.Considering the general characteristics and limitations of the previous studies,this study makes a cross-linguistic and cross-disciplinary examination of evidential use in English and Chinese abstracts in four disciplines.The study aims to show whether different cultural and disciplinary background of writers will exert influence on their adoption of evidentiality in abstracts writing.Firstly,in this study,we classify evidentiality into four types and then present the lexicogrammatical realizations of evidentiality in English and Chinese abstracts in detail,In our study,evidentiality is regarrded as a semantic category and it can be realized by many different lexical forms.The findings show that one evidential type both in English and Chinese abstracts can be realized by several different lexicogrammatical forms and the realizations of evidentiality are almost equivalent on semantic level and linguistic forms between English and Chinese abstracts.Secondly,the quantitative data analyses of the distribution of four types of evidentiality in English and Chinese abstracts show that writers of both English and Chinese abstracts are conscious of the adoption of evidentiality in their abstracts writing.However,the frequency of evidentiality in English abstracts is much higher than that in Chinese abstracts and the lexicogrammatical realizations of four evidential types in English abstracts are more complex and various than those in Chinese abstracts.The distribution of four types of evidentiality is unbalanced.Reporting and inferring evidentiality are the two most frequently used evidential types both in English and Chinese abstracts,with less use of other two evidential types.The distribution of various forms of realizations of evidentiality in English and Chinese abstracts is also unbalanced.Thirdly,based on the detailed analysis and comparison of evidentiality both in English and Chinese abstracts among hard and soft disciplines,it can be inferred that the objectivity of English abstracts is much higher than that of Chinese abstracts and the impersonality and objectivity of abstracts of hard disciplines is higher than that of soft disciplines.Accordingly,writers of Chinese abstracts may bear higher responsibility for the reliability and certainty of the information than writers of English abstracts do,and writers of hard disciplines bear less responsibility for the information that they present than writers of soft disciplines do.The current study has significance both in theory and in practice.In theory,it presents a complete and comprehensive picture of the classification and lexicogrammatical realizations of evidentiality both in English and Chinese abstracts,which will be useful to widen the evidential studies of academic discourse.Besides,the comprehensive presentation of the lexicogrammatical realizations of evidentiality in English abstracts,especially in Chinese abstracts,will deepen people’s understanding of evidentiality in abstracts and shed lights on the future studies concerning evidentiality.In practice,the current study has pedagogical significance in that it may increase people’s intercultural and interdisciplinary consciousness in the process of writing,reading and learning academic discourse and give implications on the learning and teaching of academic writing in China.