Evidential Use Research Articles

Active participation within written argumentation: metadiscourse and editorialist's authority

Abstract This paper aims to demonstrate how the elite newspaper, Le Monde , constructs active participation within its editorials’ argumentation to establish its authority. This active participation is revealed through the analysis of three metadiscursive categories, evidentials, person markers and relational markers, in connection with the editorials’ argumentative structure. It appears that Le Monde 's editorialists present themselves as responsible and competent journalists, as representatives of public opinion, and as independent and committed intellectuals in the French tradition. These strategies attest to Le Monde 's persuasive abilities in playing one part of its audience (public opinion) against the other (ruling elite), or appealing to them together on a matter of foreign policy. In conclusion, the role of context in the use of evidentials, person markers and relational markers in editorials is underlined; the question of a theoretical framework for media audience is raised; and the role of world guardian of “Truth, Justice, Reason and Universality” that is apparent in Le Monde 's polyphonic discourse is critically questioned.

Evidentiality and deixis in narrative retelling

Evidentiality, the linguistic coding of source and reliability of information, has long been characterized as a deictic phenomenon in language (Jakobson, 1957; Schlichter, 1986; Woodbury, 1986). Although it is generally accepted that evidential forms function to index information to a source and an interpreter of that source (typically the speaker), there has been little study of the ways in which speakers make use of this property in discourse. This paper presents an analysis of evidential use in Macedonian narrative retellings that clarifies the deictic function of evidentiality in discourse. A version of Deictic Center Theory (Duchan et al., 1995), a recent framework developed specifically for narrative analysis, is used to show how evidential markers are used to build the perspective structure of narrative texts and how they are manipulated by speakers to express information from different viewpoints.

Evidentiality in ritual discourse: The social construction of religious meaning

ABSTRACTThe communal creation of religious meaning is here examined in the context of an Irish Catholic Charismatic prayer meeting. Through a micro-analysis of the “spontaneous” ritual language of one such meeting, various discursive strategies are revealed which function to create for the participants an experience of divine/human communication. These include an explicit effort on the part of speakers to construct a thematically consistent and coherent ritual event out of a sequence of apparently spontaneous individual speech acts, as well as a marked use of evidentials to attribute spiritual authorship and authority to personal speech acts. In contrast to what has been suggested as the self-evident nature of ritual speech, the frequent use of evidentials is related to the relatively recent emergence of the movement, its ideology, and its emphasis on the personal narrative as the central form of religious discourse. (Ritual language, evidentials, Catholic religion, charismatic religion, religious movements, authority in discourse)

Evidentials, Argumentation, and Epistemological Stance

ne of the textual dimensions of written language is the use of evidentials, which linguists define broadly as words and phrases that express attitudes toward knowledge (Chafe). In this discourse analysis, I argue that the use of evidentials illuminates differences between arguments written by experienced academic writers and those written by student writers and, in so doing, reveals underlying differences in the epistemological stance of each group.

The evidential use ofbecause

(1979). The evidential use of because. Paper in Linguistics: Vol. 12, No. 1-2, pp. 231-238.

Evidential Use of Mathematically Determined Probability

Evidential Use of Mathematically Determined Probability