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Chapter One Introduction

1.1Overview of Evidentiality
According to Chafe (1986), evidentiality is a semantic category which can berealized grammatically, lexically or in any other linguistic forms, which not onlyindicates the source of information but also the attitudes toward information. Takingthe following sentences for example,(1) I see her coming down the hall.(2) I hear her taking a shower.(3) He is quite nice, and certainly very cheery.(4) It must be a spider.The above-italicized expressions are evidentials which can either indicate the sourceof information as in the first two examples, or manifest the speaker’s attitude towardthe information as in the last two examples.Boas was the first scholar to put forward the concept of evidential in his works.In his introduction to The Handbook of American Indian Languages, Boas (1911a)indicated that the speaker must specify the source of information by adding modalitiesof the verb in Kwakiutl, but the term EVIDENTIAL occurred in his posthumouslypublished Kwakiutl Grammar(1947). Since then, evidentiality has become a specificterm and been introduced into the linguistic study. In 1957, Roman Jacobsen, a friendof Boa’s, introduced the term EVIDENTIAL as a “tentative label”for the genericverbal category in his important treatise Shifters, Verbal categories, and the RussianVerb. He was also the first person to treat evidentiality as an independent category.Thereafter, by the early eighties, evidentiality gradually became an establishedresearch topic in linguistics. In 1981, a conference about evidentiality was organizedin Berkeley, and after that, the first collection named Evidentiality: The linguistic coding of epistemology (Chafe and Nichols, 1986) was published. With theappearance of this significant work, the notion of evidentiality was established inlinguistics solidly. (Dendale and Tasmowski, 2001:340) In 1998, the 6thInternational Pragmatics Conference was held in Reims, in which evidentiality wasdiscussed as a special issue and the collection of the papers was published by theJournal of Pragmatics in 2001. From then on, more and more scholars have beenconcerned with this topic.As for the domestic study of
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1.2Significance of the Study
The study of evidentiality is an effective way for discourse analysis, which candisplay some features of different discourses. Therefore, it is of practical significance.(Hu Zhuanglin, 1995:13)Chafe (1986) made a survey on evidentiality in English conversation andacademic writing, in which the different frequency of evidentials and the reasons werepresented. Mushin (2001) made a survey on the functions of reportive evidentialcoding in spoken Japanese narrative retelling, whose results indicated that the study ofevidentiality not only took into consideration the presence and absence of evidentialsbut also the motivations of the speakers to choose particular evidential strategies.Domestically, Hu (1994b) discussed the evidentiality on news report and debatediscourse. Fang (2005) approached evidentiality in general based on thesystemic-functional framework. Tangbin (2007) and Yang Linxiu (2009) also tooksystemic-functional linguistics as their theoretical basis, but they focused on the studyfrom specific genres, which are English news reports of epidemic situation update andEnglish research articles respectively.
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