A Comparative Study of Evidentiality in Abstracts of English and Chinese Research Articles

Abstract

Abstract-This paper is a comparative study of evidentiality in abstracts of English and Chinese research articles. This study chooses 50 English linguistics abstracts and 50 Chinese linguistics abstracts. This paper first describes the lexicogrammatical realizations of evidentiality both in English and Chinese linguistics abstracts. Then, it specifically compares the use of reporting evidentials and inferring evidentials in English and Chinese abstracts. The findings are: the frequency of evidential use in English abstracts is higher than that in Chinese abstracts; the lexicogrammatical realizations of evidentiality in English abstracts are much more various and complex than those in Chinese abstracts. Besides, the analysis and comparison of the use of reporting and inferring evidentials in English and Chinese abstracts shows that the objectivity of English abstracts is higher than that of Chinese abstracts, and accordingly, the Chinese writers may bear higher responsibility for the information than English writers do. This study may be beneficial to the learning and teaching of academic writing in China, and on the other hand, it will enrich the study of evidentiality in academic discourses. Index Terms-evidentiality, lexicogrammatical realizations, abstracts of English and Chinese research articles

Comparative Analysis of Evidentiality in Spoken and Written Academic Discourse

“…Except for the two factors introduced above, the effect of language used by writers (Alonso-Almeida, 2015) and the cultural background of writers (Shui & Ji, 2015;Wang, 2016;Yang, Xu, & Liu, 2019) 66 concordances of these evidential markers appeared in the PICAE are collected and re-identified with three of the standards proposed by Anderson (1986), in which evidentials should be (i) the justification for a factual claim which is available to the person making that claim, whether direct evidence plus observation (no inference needed), evidence plus inference; inference (evidence unspecified), and reasoned expectation from logic and other facts; (ii) not the main predication; (iii) indication of evidence as their primary meaning. Since the criteria proposed by Anderson (1986) originally hold for grammatical evidentiality, the last criterion -never occurring as a derivational morpheme nor as an element in a compound-need not be considered when it is applied to lexical evidentiality.…”

A Corpus-Based Genre and Language Feature Analysis of Chinese and English Linguistics and Literature Article Abstracts

“…Li Qingming and Zhang Min [4] made an analysis on the context of Chinese and English Academic Article Abstracts. What's more, Yan Meijuan [5] and Shi Wenxia [6] did research on the Medical and Scientific article abstracts respectively. Chen Ruina [7] and Ye Ning [8] made an analysis on English and Chinese article abstracts from the perspective of genre set while Li Yanfang [9] and Wang Zhou [10] did studies on hedges in Chinese and English RA abstracts.…”