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摘要：More and more researches have been conducted to depict the evidentiality systemsin various languages or dialects since the mid-1980s. Some researchers, such as Willett(1988) and Aikhenvald (2004), contributed to the classification of evidentials; someother researchers describe the relationship between evidentiality and modality.

> Chapter FourRESULTS AND DISCUSSION

4.1 General Features of Evidentiality in English News
All the sentences add up to 1343, in which 755 evidentials are counted. Therefore,the average frequency of evidentiality is 0.562 per sentences, with 0.235 as its lowestand 0.818 as its highest.With this table, we could make a comparison between the data of Hu and thisstudy. In Hu‘s research, we find that he discovered 23 evidentials out of 28 sentences(1994), and the frequency is 0.821 per sentence. It is obvious that the figure in thisresearch is much lowed than Hu‘s. The difference of the result could be resulted fromless language data and limited coverage of Hu‘s research.From the result of 0.562 per sentences we can infer that no evidentials are found inmany sentences. Or in other words, many sentences are written with zero-markedevidentials. As stated in Chapter 2, such occasions could be called zero-markedevidentials. Why are there so many sentences with zero-marked evidentials in newsdiscourse? Explanation of this phenomenon will be discussed with facts from twoaspects, that is, source of information and speaker‘s attitude toward the information.First, from the source of the information, since some of the information in news isalready known by the readers, the source of information can be left unspecified. Hu alsonotes that if a statement has been known as universal truth or common sense, and it iseasily understood and verified by the listener, the speaker could employ zero-markedevidential. For example,
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Conclusion

1）The result indicates that evidentials occur very frequent in English news. We canfind 7 types of evidentials: reliability, hearsay, induction, deduction, belief, verbaland expectation. The frequency of evidentiality in English news could be listedfrom high to low: hearsay (57%) > expectation (14%) > reliability (10%) >deduction (9%) > induction (7%) > belief (2%) > verbal resources (1%). Hearsayevidentials takes over 61 percent of all evidentials, while the number of belief andverbal resources is very small. This is a most remarkable feature of evidentiality inEnglish news.
2）Though some common features of evidentiality are found in news, there are somedistinct differences still exists between hard news and soft news. Reporters tend touse more evidentials and choose more subjective-oriented types in soft news than inhard news these findings could be originated from different tasks of the twosubcategories of news: hard news focuses on the event while soft news providesrelatively creative and intensive knowledge in which personal attitudes andcomments are allowed. Thus, the subjective degree of soft news is higher than thatof hard news due to the more choices of subjective evidentials use.
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