Evidentiality is a universal language phenomenon. Evidentiality not only refers to the source of knowledge that the speaker obtained but also can show and influence the speaker's attitude to the credibility of the...Evidentiality is a universal language phenomenon. Evidentiality not only refers to the source of knowledge that the speaker obtained but also can show and influence the speaker's attitude to the credibility of the information. Based on Hu Zhuanglin's theory of evidentiality, this paper was transcribed as corpus with a total of 50448 words by the videos of the 2016 Presidential Debates. Combined with quantitative and qualitative analysis, this paper uses software Ant Conc3.4.4 w and Excel as tools to complete data reduction, statistics and retrieval of the corpus which results are presented in the form of charts.This paper compares Hilary and Trump's evidentiality in terms of the types, frequency and distribution in American presidential debates aiming to explore how the American presidential candidates improve the reliability of language and convince the audience by using evidentiality. Some findings are as following: Four types of evidentials all appear in the corpus and each type has exerted different impact on presidential debate. Among the four types of evidentials, deduction evidential boasts the highest frequency of evidentials, followed by hearsay, belief and induction. The distribution of evidential is uneven. It is suggested that there are two main reasons for the difference: First, the difference between two candidates' personal language habits, their character, professional experience and background. Second, the different speaking time, strategies emphases and rules of the three presidential debates is inconsistent which has also influenced the difference.展开更多
文摘Evidentiality is a universal language phenomenon. Evidentiality not only refers to the source of knowledge that the speaker obtained but also can show and influence the speaker's attitude to the credibility of the information. Based on Hu Zhuanglin's theory of evidentiality, this paper was transcribed as corpus with a total of 50448 words by the videos of the 2016 Presidential Debates. Combined with quantitative and qualitative analysis, this paper uses software Ant Conc3.4.4 w and Excel as tools to complete data reduction, statistics and retrieval of the corpus which results are presented in the form of charts.This paper compares Hilary and Trump's evidentiality in terms of the types, frequency and distribution in American presidential debates aiming to explore how the American presidential candidates improve the reliability of language and convince the audience by using evidentiality. Some findings are as following: Four types of evidentials all appear in the corpus and each type has exerted different impact on presidential debate. Among the four types of evidentials, deduction evidential boasts the highest frequency of evidentials, followed by hearsay, belief and induction. The distribution of evidential is uneven. It is suggested that there are two main reasons for the difference: First, the difference between two candidates' personal language habits, their character, professional experience and background. Second, the different speaking time, strategies emphases and rules of the three presidential debates is inconsistent which has also influenced the difference.
