英语论文网

Chapter OneIntroduction

When making judgments in daily communication, people are not always certain ofwhat they say or assert. If the information is from their visual sense or they have solidevidence to prove it, they would be sure of the proposition. However, if theinformation is merely their subjective presumption or heard from others, they would beuncertain. In such cases, people would add some modifiers to their utterances in orderto specify the source of information or show their attitudes towards the information.Such modifiers are termed as “evidentials”, which are the linguistic forms ofevidentiality.The thesis will study evidentiality in Chinese and American college students’English speeches. The introduction part includes background of the study, objectives ofthe study, significance of the study, data collection and analysis as well as organizationof the thesis.

1.1 Background of the Study
Evidentiality is an emerging research topic in the field of linguistics, which hasdrawn the attention of many scholars at home and abroad in recent years. The rising ofevidentiality results from the changes of people’s attitudes towards language.Traditionally, language is regarded as a tool to express propositional meaning (Lyons,1982). However, with the development of functional linguistics and cognitivelinguistics, the role of language has changed. Language is no longer just a tool forexpressing propositional meaning. It is also used to express the speaker’s attitude,emotion and stance (Finegan, 1995; Shen Jiaxuan, 2001). Therefore, it is not surprisingthat the study of evidentiality has attracted more and more attention.In the narrow sense, evidentiality mainly indicates the speaker’s source ofinformation. In the broad sense, it manifests the source of information as well as thespeaker’s attitude or commitment to the factuality of the information. The reliability ofthe information is indicated by the speaker’s epistemic attitudes. The source andreliability of the information are added to the proposition, so they are not part of thepropositional meaning.Evidentiality is realized by “evidentials” or “evidential markers”, which mainlyhave two forms of instantiation: morphological evidentials and lexical evidentials.Morphological evidentials are also called grammatical evidentials, which arerepresented by prefixes and suffixes in some languages, for example, Wintu andAmerican Indian languages. Lexical evidentials are represented by some verbs,adverbs, adjectives, auxiliary verbs or adverbial phrases, for example “believe”,“obviously”, “certain”, “may” and “according to”. Evidentiality in Chinese andEnglish is lexically marked, and there is no grammatical evidential in the twolanguages. It is noteworthy that Japanese has both grammatical evidentials and lexicalevidentials.
.........

1.2 Objectives of the Study
The applied studies of evidentiality in various discourses have attracted theattention of some linguists. Chafe (1986) makes a comparative study of evidentiality inEnglish conversation and English academic writing. Hu Zhuanglin (1994a) makes acomparative evidential analysis between news report and debating discourse. He findsthat hearsay evidentials are predominant in news report, while belief, induction andreliability evidentials are used more frequently than other types of evidentials indebating discourse. Thus, evidentiality is an effective means of discourse analysis.Th