A Comparative Study of Evidentiality in RAs in Applied Linguistics Written by NS and Chinese Writers

Abstract

This paper is devoted to a comparative study of evidentiality in RAs (Research Articles) of NS (Native speakers) and Chinese writers. It examines whether cultural factors influence the writer's choice concerning evidentiality and the interpersonal functions of evidentiality. First, it illustrates the necessity of the comparative study. Second, it presents the findings, including the similarities and the differences. Third, the pedagogical implications are pointed out Keywords: Evidentiality; Comparative Study; RAs IntroductionAs a pervasive linguistic phenomenon in almost all languages, evidentiality has recently been arousing the interest of linguists and has become a hot research topic in linguistics. It has been studied from various perspectives (e.g. Chafe, 1986; Palmer, 1990 Palmer, , 2001Mushin, 2000Mushin, , 2001 Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004;Hu, 1994aHu, , 1994bFang, 2005; Tang, 2007; Yang, 2009 Yang, , 2010. Each has its own interest, purpose and research focus and sheds light on evidentiality. To further the study of evidentiality in RAs written by the writers from different cultural background, this paper makes a comparative study of evidentiality in RAs in applied linguistics written by NS and Chinese speakers. The study shows that the use of evidentiality in RAs is both universal, cultural, and language-specific. Definition of Evidentialitiy in the Current StudyEvidentiality has become a hot research topic in linguistics. However, there has been no consensus yet on what evidentiality is and what kind of linguistic category it is. The disagreements mainly occur in the following aspects. The first is whether evidentiality is a grammatical category or a semantic one. The second is what the semantic scope of evidentiality is.As to the issue of whether evidentiality is a grammatical category or a semantic one, studies have shown that it is language-specific. In about a quarter of the world's languages, every statement is required to specify the type of source on which it is based-for example, whether the speaker sees it, hears it, infers it from indirect evidence, or learns it from someone else. This linguistic category, whose primary meaning is information source, is called "evidentiality". In Boas ' (1938: p. 133) words, "while for us definiteness, number, and time are obligatory aspects, we find in another language location near the speaker or someone else, [and] source of informationwhether seen, heard, or inferred-as obligatory aspects."From Boas' words, it can be seen that in some languages, evidentiality is an obligatory category. As to how to express evidentiality, different languages demonstrate different evidential systems. Tariana, an Arawak language, spoken in the multilingual area of the Vaupes in northeast Amazonia, has a complex evidential system. In this language, one cannot (cannot) simply say "Jose played football". Instead, speakers have to specify whether they see the event happen, hear it, or know about it because somebody else tells them, etc. This is achieved through a set ...

Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis of Evidentiality in PHD Dissertations

“…Evidentiality as a linguistic system is studied from diff erent perspectives, such as the acquisition of evidentiality in various languages (Aksu-Koç 1988, O'Neill & Atance 2000, Ifantidou 2005, Fitneva 2008, Oztürk 2008, Jeschull & Roeper 2009, Aydın & Ceci 2009, Rett & Hyams 2014, Koring & De Mulder 2015; the use of evidentiality in a variety of genres in diff erent languages, such as English newspapers (Bednarek 2006), diachronic analysis of newspaper articles from 1993-2005 (Clark 2010), the aspect of illocution (Sbisa 2014), Chinese newspaper reports in terms of subjectivity and objectivity (Hsieh 2008), Greek cultural characteristics and academic writing (Koutsantoni 2005), English academic discourse (Fetzer 2014, Yang 2014, a comparative study of the use of research articles by Chinese and English native speakers (Yang 2012), and reporting evidentials in English research articles (Yang 2013) (see also Fetzer & Oishi 2014). There is also research, albeit relatively more limited in number, which analyzes evidentiality in spoken data (interview corpus in French-English bilingual discourse in King & Nadasdi 1999, telephone conversations in Korean in Kim 2005, political debates in English in Berlin & Prieto-Mendoza 2014).…”

“…Hence, the speaker has a chance to revise and update some of his utterances to fulfi ll the listeners' expectations. Yang (2012) compares and contrasts the native speakers of English and the native speakers of Chinese to determine whether any diff erence occurs in their evidential use in research articles. It is found that while reporting and inferring evidential markings are the most frequently encountered evidential items, belief and sensory evidentials are the least frequent evidential items in both of the databases.…”