Abstract
This paper is a cross-disciplinary study of evidentiality in English abstracts. The corpus consists of 200 abstracts of English RAs of four disciplines: linguistics, philosophy, computer and electronics. Firstly, our study presents the lexicogrammatical realizations of evidentiality in English abstracts of four disciplines, and then it compares the cross-disciplinary use of evidentiality from the analyses of reporting evidentials and modal verbs in inferring evidentials. The analyses show significant differences in the distribution and frequency of four evidential types in abstracts of the four disciplines and also show that different disciplinary conventions of writers may influence their choice of evidentiality in their abstracts writing. It is hoped that this study may be helpful to enrich the study of evidentiality in academic discourses. Besides, it may give implications on the learning and teaching of academic writing.
Highlights
Evidentiality is pervasive in almost all languages around the world
This paper examines evidentiality in abstracts of English RAs of four disciplines
It presents the lexicogrammatical realizations of evidentiality in English abstracts firstly
Summary
Evidentiality is pervasive in almost all languages around the world. The researchers have paid much attention to the study of evidentiality from different perspectives, such as Chafe (1986), Aikhenvald (2003, 2004) and so on. As to the study of evidentiality in discourses, many researchers have devoted to many different types of discourses, such as English news reports, English research articles (RAs in the following) and so on, but evidentiality in abstracts of RAs hasn’t attracted much attention of linguists, not even to say the cross-disciplinary study of evidentiality in English abstracts. This paper aims to fill in the niche. A Cross-Disciplinary Study of Evidentiality in Abstracts of English Research Articles. Open Journal of Modern Linguistics, 5, 399-411.
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