| Evidentiality is a way of expressing sources of information and the speaker’s attitude towards the information.It is usually adopted by academic writers to promote the persuasion of their studies.There are a growing number of comparative studies on evidentiality,while few studies have probed into characteristics of evidentiality in natural sciences and social sciences.Based on the classification of Yang(2015),the present study randomly selects 160 English RAs of 8 representative disciplines from famous international journals to construct natural sciences corpus and social sciences corpus.By investigating the frequency and lexicogrammatical realizations of the four evidential types of in RAs of natural sciences and social sciences,this study aims to explore differences and similarities of evidentiality between natural sciences and social sciences.By quantitative analysis,the present study indicates that: 1.In natural sciences,reporting evidentials are the most frequently used,followed by inferring evidentials,sensory evidentials and belief evidentials.In social sciences,inferring evidentials are the most frequently used,followed by reporting evidentials,belief evidentials and sensory evidentials.It shows that the distribution of the four types of evidentials is unbalanced in the two fields.Besides,the results of chi-square test suggest there are significant differences in the four evidential types in natural sciences and social sciences.2.(1)In sensory evidentials,academic writers in natural sciences tend to present sensory evidentials in objective forms,while academic writers in social sciences show a balance in subjective forms and objective forms.(2)In reporting evidentials,the least frequently used form is noun clause and prepositional phrase in natural sciences and social sciences respectively,while the most frequently used form is X plus reporting verbs in both.Academic writers in social sciences emphasize more on the use of active forms and show little preference on passive forms of reporting verbs.It also shows that disciplinary differences partly influence the use of evidentials.(3)In inferring evidentials,RAs of natural sciences show similar characteristics to RAs of social sciences in the distribution of lexicogrammatical realizations.Besides,modal verbs are widely adopted in both.It also indicates that modal verbs with high value are rarely adopted while modal verbs with lowvalue and median value are frequently used.(4)In belief evidentials,the use of this evidential type almost depends on the form of first-person pronoun plus psychological verbs both in natural sciences and social sciences.In natural sciences,the most frequently used psychological words are consider,assume,find,propose and believe.In social sciences,consider,argue,find,think and assume are most frequently used.It indicates that neutral words are widely adopted and academic writers are inclined to use more objective ways than subjective ways to express their viewpoints.In addition,the use of belief evidentials in natural sciences are more influenced by disciplinary differences than that in social sciences.This thesis explores the distribution of the four types of evidentials in RAs of natural sciences and social sciences,revealing some differences and similarities of evidentiality in the two fields.The author expects to enrich the cross-disciplinary study on evidentiality and provide some suggestions for academic writing in natural sciences and social sciences. |
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