A Diachronic Study Of Evidentiality In English Research Articles In Applied Linguistics

As a pervasive language phenomenon,evidentiality is used to denote the source of information or express the writer’s or speaker’s attitude towards the information.The lexico-grammatical realization forms of evidentiality are termed “evidentials” or “evidential markers”.In recent years,evidential studies have gained currency within the field of English academic writing.Different scholars have approached evidentiality from varying perspectives,but almost all the previous studies are concerned with the synchronic features of evidentiality in different languages and genres.Few studies have explored the diachronic change of evidentials in academic discourse.In light of this,this thesis aims to explore the diachronic change of evidentiality in English research articles within the field of applied linguistics.To track the diachronic change of the use of evidentiality in English RAs in applied linguistics,the current thesis conducts a diachronic study to investigate the overall change of the four types of evidentials as well as their lexico-grammatical realization forms.This thesis chooses English research articles from four internationally renowned journals in the field of applied linguistics published between 1960 and 2019.We then create six corpora by randomly taking research articles from these four journals spaced at six periods over the past 60 years.To balance the corpus size,the total word number of each corpus is about 200,000 and thus the whole corpora amounts to 1,200,000 or so.All evidentials are tagged with different marks manually with the help of Antconc3.2.4.Then,the frequency of all evidential types and their lexico-grammatical realization forms are counted and normalized to per 1,000 words.The overall diachronic distribution of the four types of evidentials and their lexico-grammatical realization forms are explored by quantitative analysis.The results of this thesis show that the frequency of the overall evidentials in English RAs in applied linguistics shows an increasing trend,which indicates that writers of applied linguistics RAs place an increasing emphasis on denoting the source of information and showing their stance on the information.In any period reporting and inferring evidentials are much more frequently used and account for the majority of all evidentials while belief and sensory evidentials are of a very low frequency.As for the four types of evidentials as well as their lexico-grammatical realization forms,we find that:(1)the frequency of sensory evidentials witnesses an increase in the first three periods and then stabilizes.Generally speaking,the visual evidential “see + what” undergoes a rise in its frequency in RAs over time.This sensory evidential form that omits the subject of the active form of “see” makes the information seem objective because the active form of the sensory evidential “see” is considered to be more subjective.(2)The frequency of reporting evidentials is stable in the first two periods and sees a rise from the third period and then levels off.On the whole,reporting verbs and “author + date” forms see a rise in their frequency while prepositional phrase shows a downward trend.Besides,the frequency of reporting verbs accounts for the majority of all realization forms of reporting evidential.(3)The frequency of referring evidentials shows a decreasing trend and then levels off.At any period,the evidentials modal verb is the most frequently used realization form and accounts for the majority of all referring evidentials forms.But on the whole its frequency sees a decrease while the frequency of “it + clause” is on the rise.(4)The frequency of belief evidentials generally shows an increasing trend.At any period,the subjective form of belief evidentials including “I/we + mental verb” and prepositional phrase is much more frequently used than the objective form “it + clause”.This thesis explores the diachronic change of evidentials in English RAs in applied linguistics,which is expected to provide a diachronic perspective for evidential studies,thus enriching theories related to evidentiality,enable a better understanding of evidentials and RAs and offer some pedagogical suggestions for English Academic writing.