Evidentiality in English Research Articles of Applied Linguistics: From the Perspective of Metadiscourse

This paper investigates, from the metadiscourse perspective, the linguistic phenomenon of evidentiality in English Research Articles (RAs) of applied linguistics. Based on a corpus of 100 RAs, the study first presents its own classification of evidentiality and their specific lexicogrammatical realizations. Then, following Hyland's metadiscourse model (2005), it examines in detail how different evidential types and linguistic realizations can function as various metadiscourse devices and what roles they can play in the construction and attainment of persuation. The study has shown the multiple metadiscourse functions of evidentiality. It provides a new perspective to understand evidentiality. Index Terms--evidentiality, metadiscourse, RAs