A Corpus based analysis of evidentiality in academic writing
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Date
2024
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University of Oum El Bouaghi
Abstract
Evidentiality, the lexical or grammatical indication of the speaker’s/writer’s source of knowledge and the degree of reliability, has received much academic attention in the last sixteen years. Adding to the increasing body of research in this area, the current study aimed to examine evidentiality use under the broad view (Chafe, 1986) in the PhD’ discussion sections written in English by native English-speaking (American), native Algerian, and native Turkish authors whose first languages are English, Arabic, and Turkish, respectively. It primarily sought to reveal whether nonnative speakers differ from one another regarding evidentiality use and whether nonnative speakers use similar features to those of native speakers of English. Additionally, it also intended to determine the way they attain knowledge. By taking a mixed-method research design in a comparative corpus and by adopting the Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis (Granger, 1996; 1998), this study made use of both the AntConc software (4.2.4) and the log-likelihood calculator for the sake of achieving the aims. In terms of the native language/interlanguage comparison, the results showed variations between native English speaking authors and native Turkish authors. However, evidentiality was used similarly between native English and Algerian authors, with tiny differences. Regarding the interlanguage/interlanguage comparison, native Algerian authors differ from native Turkish authors in terms of evidentiality use. Moreover, markers of deduction, reliability, and matching knowledge against expectations were highly used by the three groups of authors. The findings of the present study may give applied linguists new insights to introduce methods and ways of incorporating evidentiality in syllabi for teaching academic writing.