“Figure 2 shows that …”: Evidentiality in Chinese graduate students’ research articles

Abstract

Evidentiality is an important interpersonal resource in academic discourse, indicating sources of information and authorial commitment to propositions. Compared to other interpersonal resources in academic writing, however, evidentiality is an understudied area. In particular, much is unknown about the possible similarities/differences between student writers and expert writers in their use of evidentiality in research articles (RAs). The present study, adopting a systemic functional linguistics perspective, reports a corpus-based comparative examination of evidentiality in Chinese graduate students' coursework RAs and expert writers' published RAs. The study's aim is to discern the extent to which Chinese graduate students differ from expert writers in their use of evidentiality in English RAs in four disciplines: mathematics, physics, metallurgy, and materials science. The results showed that Chinese graduate students, as English as a foreign language (EFL) writers, use significantly more evidentials in their RAs than expert writers and their repertoire of evidentials is relatively limited. Chinese graduate students also show strong preferences for certain types and realizations of evidentiality and thus display less variety and flexibility in their use of evidentials in their RAs. This study provides evidence for the relationship between writers' writing skills and language proficiency and their use of evidentiality in RAs, and may contribute to our understanding of evidentiality in academic discourse.