Evidentiality is the linguistic representation encoding the source of the said proposition and indicating its credibility, and broadly defined, it also embodies the author’s assessment of information sources and involvement in the said proposition. This paper intends to explore how the author constructs text credibility by interpreting author’s pragmatic strategies in using lexical and sentential evidentials in specific texts according to the baseline of information reliability. The finding shows that the subjectivity of the source of information serve the author’s construction of the whole text, and therefore text credibility holds an unstable position in the territory moving according to the game between author’s pragmatic manipulation of text evidentiality and reader’s cognitive interpretation, and the rationality and appropriateness of author’s pragmatic adjustment of evidentials within the range of information reliability is weighted in determining text credibility. As linguistic markers of evidentiality in texts, the frequency of evidentials used in texts changes according to different styles’ need for credibility.
CHEN Zheng
. Pragmatic Analysis of Text Credibility Based on Evidentiality[J]. Contemporary Foreign Languages Studies, 2014
, 14(04)
: 23
-28
.
DOI: 10.3969/j.issn.1674-8921.2014.04.006
Aijmer, K. 2008. The Semantic Field of Modal Certainty: A Corpus-Based Study of English Adverbs [M]. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Aikhenvald, A. Y. 2003. Evidentiality in typological perspective [A]. In A. Y. Aikhenvald & R. M. W. Dixon (eds.). Studies In Evidentiality [C]. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 33-62.
Aikhenvald, A. Y. 2004. Evidentiality [M]. New York: Oxford University Press.
Aikhenvald, A. Y. 2007. Information source and evidentiality: What can we conclude? [J]. Rivista di Linguistica 19(1): 209-27.
Anderson, L. B. 1986. Evidentials, paths of change, and mental maps: Typologically regular asymmetries [A]. In W. Chafe & J. Nichols (eds.). Evidentiality: The Linguistic Coding of Epistemology [C]. Norwood, New Jersey: Ablex. 273-312.
Boas, F. 1947. Kwakiutl grammar, with a glossary of the suffixes [J]. Transactions of the American Philosophical Society (37): 201-377.
Chafe, W. 1986. Evidentiality in English conversation and academic writing [A]. In W. Chafe & J. Nichols (eds.). Evidentiality: The Linguistic Coding of Epistemology [C]. Norwood: Ablex. 261-72.
Chafe, W. & J. Nichols (eds.). 1986. Evidentiality: The Linguistic Coding of Epistemology [C]. Norwood: Ablex.
de Haan, F. 1998. The Category of Evidentiality [D]. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico.
Faller, M. 2002a. Semantics and Pragmatics of Evidentials in Cuzco Quechua [D]. California: Stanford University.
Faller, M. 2002b. Remarks on evidential hierarchies [A]. In I. D. Beaver, L. D. C. Martnez, B. Z. Clark & S. Kaufmann (eds.). The Construction of Meaning [C]. Stanford: CSLI. 37-59.
Hsieh, C. L. 2008. Evidentiality in Chinese newspaper reports: Subjectivity/objectivity as a factor [J]. Discourse Studies 10(2): 205-29.
Mushin, I. 2000. Evidentiality and deixis in narrative retelling [J]. Journal of Pragmatics 32 (7): 927-57.
Palmer, F. R. 1986. Mood and Modality (2nd ed.) [M]. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Plungian, V. A. 2001. The place of evidentiality within the universal grammatical space [J]. Journal of Pragmatics 33(3): 349-57.
Willett, T. 1988. A cross-linguistic survey of the grammaticalization of evidentiality [J]. Studies in Language (12): 51-97.
陈颖.2009.现代汉语传信范畴研究[M].北京:中国社会科学出版社.
房红梅.2006.言据性研究述评[J].现代外语(2):191-96.
胡壮麟.1994a.语言的可证性[J].外语教学与研究(1):9-15.
胡壮麟.1994b.可证性,新闻报道和论辩语体[J].外语研究(2):22-28.
王石川.2012.校长搬椅子和处长训教授[N].新民晚报(08-17):A4.
