A Contrastive Study of Evidentiality in English and Chinese MA Thesis Abstracts

摘要

Evidentiality is a linguistic category which is about the speaker's expression of source of information. The linguistic forms of evidentiality are termed as evidential or evidential markers. The present study is based on a total of 60 MA thesis abstracts written by Chinese and US MA students in the different disciplines from 2006 to 2018. The abstracts are selected from different fields of discipline, such as agriculture, chemistry, biology, education, language, psychology, sociology and so on. This paper is a combination of quantitative study and qualitative study, aiming at illuminating: first, the frequency and distribution of evidential types in English and Chinese MA thesis abstracts; second, the discourse features of MA thesis abstracts reflected by the use of evidentials; third, the similarities and differences of the use of evidentials between two languages; fourth, the factors resulting in these differences. Through the analysis, it is found that the use of evidentials is in low frequency and lack of variety. It is revealed that in both corpora, the reporting and inferring evidentials are more frequently adopted than sensory and belief evidentials. The choice of the evidentials clearly reflects the objective, highly-reliable and concise features of the MA thesis abstracts. This paper is also expected to throw some light on the writing and reading of research articles.