| Academic discourses state the fact objectively and precisely according to the certain source of information as far as possible,expressing the writer’s explicit attitude,which is prior to be demonstrated in academic writing.Evidentiality refers to the source of information and the speaker’s attitude.The area of study known as evidentiality has enjoyed much greater and increasing popularity in linguistic community,since many international linguists have paid more attention to the application of evidentiality in analyzing academic discourse.Nevertheless,little research on applying evidentiality to English linguistic master theses in domestic normal universities has been published.Thus this study is to investigate whether they can properly adopt evidentiality in academic thesis writing.The corpus-based comparative and empirical research provided a synchronous idea to explore the characteristics of evidentiality applied by linguistic master graduates in Northeast Normal University(NENU)and Shanxi Normal University(SXNU)in academic theses collected from 2013 to 2015 with the referent articles in a linguistic authoritative journal Applied Linguistics during the same period.This research is based on three small self-built corpora and inter-comparing the data of lexicogrammatical realizations of each evidential marker,assisted by corpus tools like Antconc,WordSmith 6.0 and Keywords Plus 2 for displaying to answer the three research questions:(1)What academic lexical features are disclosed by examining the high frequency words extracted from the three self-built corpora?(2)How do four types of evidential markers distribute in every corpus over the three years?(3)Comparing with international scholars,what are the characteristics of realization types and lexicogrammatical realizations of every type employed by English linguistic master graduates in the two domestic normal universities in academic thesis writing? First,the study analyzes the degree of lexical diversity as a basis.Although the quantity of vocabulary for mastergraduates is insufficient comparing with that of the international scholars,they still make progress in this regard.In addition,the research of high frequency words shows that some academic words like implicit,explicit,relevant,overall,whereas,potential,issue are often adopted by international scholars,but Chinese master graduates hardly give enough notice to them.Moreover,for all the samples with different distributions of four evidential markers,reporting evidential marker ranks first,followed by inferring,sensory and belief evidential marker.In terms of reporting evidential marker,the study indicates that(1)international scholars and Chinese master graduates in these two universities are fond of non-verbal realizations due to the large number of quotations;(2)it is inadequate for master graduates to employ “as ” structure,(author plus year),but they overuse “prepositional phrase” structure comparing with the scholars;(3)master graduates in SXNU do well in adopting “verb”structure comparing with those in NENU.As for inferring evidential marker,the research reveals that(1)verbal realizations are welcomed;(2)master graduates prefer will to may,ignoring copula,but scholars seldom adopt the former one and often employ the latter one,enjoying copula;(3)master graduates in SXNU perform better in employing non-verbal realizations like maybe,clearly and it is certain,especially for probably and certainty than those in NENU;however,they do worse in evidently,possibility,in general and “it is…” structure than those in NENU.The study of sensory evidential marker shows that(1)the scholars like visual realizations while master graduates love auditory ones;(2)domestic graduates are deficient in first-person pronoun plus verb “see”,see and hear as well as auditory verbs like report,claim,express;(3)the master graduates in SXNU hardly appropriately employ complain,think,especially for note;(4)comparing with master graduates in NENU,graduates in SXNU do better in the use of hear,“as” structure,passive form of visual verb “see” and maintain.The study also discovers that(1)all writers favor verbal realizations when it comes to belief evidential marker;(2)master graduates easily underestimate the usage of argue;(3)scholars dislike admittedly and it can be concluded,while master graduates prefer them;(4)master graduates in SXNU perform better than those of NENU in we believe.The research implies that learning of evidentiality is quite significant when someone proceeds academic papers.In writing class or out of class,master graduates and professors in normal universities can focus on the appropriate application of evidentiality.With the instruction of professors in evidential regard,master graduates may perform better inacademic thesis writing,since evidentiality has good reasons to academic thesis writing. |
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