A Study On Evidentiality In The State Of The Union Address From Systemic Functional Perspective

Evidentiality demonstrates the speaker’s description of the source of the information and the degree of reliability of the information.Evidentiality is named “evidentials” or“evidential markers” on the grammatical level.As a kind of universal language phenomenon,evidentiality is favored by an increasing number of linguistic scholars.In recent years,linguists’ researches on evidentiality have expanded from typological perspective,semantic perspective,and pragmatic perspective to systemic functional perspective.The State of the Union Address is the annual report of the President of the United States at the beginning of each year in the US Capitol to elaborate the government’s policy.The main content is to clarify the domestic and international situation that the nation faces every year and the policy measures that the government will take.This thesis selects 10 State of the Union Addresses as the corpus.Based on Yang Linxiu’s(2009)classification and Aikhenvald’s(2004)classification,these evidentials are classified into the reporting evidential,the sensory evidential,the belief evidential and the inferential evidential.Through the self-built corpus and the application of AntConc3.5.6 software,this thesis obtains the distribution of each type of evidentials in the State of the Union Address.The thesis is mainly to answer three questions.Firstly,what are the distribution and frequency of each category of evidentials in the State of the Union Address? Secondly,what are the lexicogrammatical realizations of evidentiality in the State of the Union Address? Thirdly,what are the ideational and interpersonal functions of evidentiality in the State of the Union Address?The results demonstrate that the four types of evidentials are unevenly distributed in the State of the Union Address.Among them,inferential evidentials account for the largest proportion,reporting evidentials take the second place,belief evidentials and sensory evidentials account for the smallest proportions.Evidentiality has different lexicogrammatical realizations in the State of the Union Address.Based on the transitivity structure and engagement system in Systemic Functional Linguistics,this thesis explores the ideational function and the interpersonal function of evidentiality inthe State of the Union Address.This thesis uses the transitivity structure to analyze evidential sentences and explore how empirical meaning is constructed.The ideational function of evidentiality indicates that evidentiality can convey empirical meaning through verbal processes,mental processes and relational processes to construct convincing information.The analysis of the interpersonal functions of evidentiality is based on the engagement system in appraisal theory.The result shows that evidentiality can create a heteroglossic communication environment.In this environment,depending on the specific context,the speaker expands and contracts the dialogue.The speaker leaves the space of dialogue for the audience,and the audience can express their opinions.Therefore,a good interpersonal relationship can be established between the speaker and the audience.By analyzing the phenomenon of evidentiality in the State of the Union Address,this thesis clarifies the practical value of evidentiality in political discourses and enriches the research content in political discourses.By analyzing the evidentials in the State of the Union Address,this thesis helps the speaker to know how to use different evidentials to achieve different communicative purposes.