A Cross-disciplinary Contrastive Study On Evidentiality In The Introduction Of English Research Articles

Evidentiality,as a linguistics feature,is about the authors' indication of information source and expression of their attitude toward the credibility of presented propositions in real linguistic communication(Fang,2015,p.27).The appropriate employment of the evidential types and corresponding lexical realizations is beneficial for writers to clearly show where the knowledge comes from and their stances toward given statements in the process of English research articles.Over the last five years,related studies on evidentiality lay more emphasis on either argumentative genre or abstracts in academic discourse because of the interpersonal functions of the genre and the significant role of abstracts in the whole article.However,less attention is drawn to the research on evidentiality in the introduction part,which is the foremost part of English research articles.The current study aims to make a corpus-based comparative analysis of evidential types and their realizations from a cross-disciplinary perspective,thus further see whether there are disciplinary differences and potential reasons behind such distinctions.The study adopts Yang's(2009)classification of evidentiality,which divides evidentials into four types,i.e.sensory evidentials,reporting evidentials,belief evidentials and inferring evidentials.The data analyzed is 200 pieces of introduction of English research articles in a self-built corpus.The papers are selected from international SSCI and SCI journals in four different subjects respectively,namely,Linguistics,Economics,Medicine,and Computer Science.With the help of Ant Conc 3.5.7 and Chi-square Test,the study intends to explore the distribution of evidential types and their realizations,and tries to answer the research questions as follows: 1)What is the overall use of evidentials in the introduction part in the four disciplines? 2)How does the introduction of English research articles in four disciplines differ in the distribution of evidential types? 3)What are the characteristics of the lexical realizations of evidential types in the introduction part of cross-disciplinary English research articles?According to the contrastive analysis of how evidentials are distributed,it can be firstly found that evidentials are all used frequently in the four disciplines,but writers in economics and linguistics employ a little more evidentials than the other two subjects.This might be influenced by the fact that research questions are often explored from numerous previous items of studies,thus a high degree of dependence on literature review exists in social science.Secondly,concerning distributions of evidential types in four disciplines,reporting evidentials account for quite a large proportion in every discipline while belief evidentials hold the smallest one in each subject.It might result from the moves of introduction that involve literature review into the writing as well as the subjectivity of personal thoughts shown by belief evidentials.Besides,there is no significant difference among the four subjects in the aspect of a single evidential type.However,there are similarities and differences among lexical realizations of each evidential type.Considering sensory evidentials,writers in all the four disciplines are inclined to employ past participle form,such as seen/shown.In regard to reporting ones,high employment of “author plus year” and reporting verbs such as show,find and suggest occurs in four disciplines.Writers of medicine and computer science tend to adopt find in paper writing,the reason for which might lie in scientific practices that natural sciences are in pursuit of.As for belief evidentials,writers in four subjects all have a preference for objective ones,particularly it can be suggested,it can be argued that and arguably.Concerning inferring ones,modal verbs with low value like may,might,can,could are employed most frequently due to less responsibility taken by writers toward the information presented.Through cross-disciplinary comparison and discussion on reasons,the study enlightens writers with the appropriate use of evidentials,and thus provides a reference for them in the academic writing of introduction.