Do readers perceive various types of knowledge expressed through evidentials in news reports with different degrees of certainty?

Abstract In the written medium, evidentiality encodes intersubjective knowledge shared between the writer and a third party who is also aware of the events occurring at the time. Journalists often use evidential markers to convey this intersubjective knowledge to readers in news reporting. Such knowledge helps to mitigate journalists’ assertiveness and enables readers to reconstruct the reported information. This study examines readers’ judgments of the knowledge expressed through various types of evidential categories in news reports. Sentences were retrieved from English and Chinese corpora, constructed in previous studies, containing news events presented with evidential markers and accompanied by readers’ certainty judgments regarding these events. The evidential markers are annotated into six categories commonly observed across languages from a typological perspective. Both quantitative and qualitative analyses are conducted to examine differences in the distributions of English and Chinese readers’ judgments across these evidential categories. Additionally, potential factors influencing how readers of different languages perceive news events are identified. This study empirically contributes to understanding whether different types of knowledge are perceived differently across languages.

• Publication year

  2025

• Venue

  Linguistics Vanguard

• Publication date

  2025-08-05

• Fields of study

  Not labeled

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1515/lingvan-2025-0021
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

• Corpus-based critical discourse analysis of reporting practices in English news reports on public health event in China and United States

  2023influential reference
• Inference versus assumption in light of the Finnish evidential-modal adverbs näköjään and varmaan

  2023cited by this paper
• How do journalists seek information from sources? A systematic review

  2022cited by this paper
• Strategic Use of (Un)certainty Expressions

  2021cited by this paper
• Reported Speech in Chinese and English Newspapers

  2021cited by this paper
• The evidentiality system in Galician and the seica marker

  2021cited by this paper
• Marking one’s own viewpoint: The Finnish evidential verb+kseni ‘as far as I understand’ construction

  2020cited by this paper
• Doing being objective: Turn design in the preliminary to a journalist’s question at the press conference of the National People’s Congress of China

  2020cited by this paper
• Do You Believe It Happened? Assessing Chinese Readers’ Veridicality Judgments

  2020cited by this paper
• Evidentiality

  2018influential reference
• Illocutional concurrences: The case of evaluative speech acts and face-work in spoken Mandarin and American English

  2018cited by this paper
• Relations Between Language and Cognition: Evidentiality and Sources of Knowledge

  2018cited by this paper
• On speaker commitment and speaker involvement. Evidence from evidentials in Spanish talk-in-interaction

  2017cited by this paper
• (De-)constructing evidentiality

  2017cited by this paper
• A quantitative approach to conceptual, procedural and pragmatic meaning: Evidence from inter-annotator agreement

  2017cited by this paper
• The multimodal marking of evidentiality:pragmemes of circumstantial inference and Mandarin written news report

  2016cited by this paper
• Shirking behavior and socially desirable responding in online surveys: A cross-cultural study comparing Chinese and American samples

  2016cited by this paper
• The Effect of Workplace Negative Gossip on Employee Proactive Behavior in China: The Moderating Role of Traditionality

  2015cited by this paper
• Four types of evidentiality in the native languages of Brazil

  2015cited by this paper
• Tensed evidentials: A typological study

  2015cited by this paper
• Viewpoint representation in journalistic crime narratives: An analysis of grammatical roles and referential expressions

  2015cited by this paper
• Stories that Count

  2014cited by this paper
• The contribution of evidentials to utterance content: Evidence from the Basque reportative particle omen

  2014cited by this paper
• Annotating Events in an Emotion Corpus

  2014cited by this paper
• Language and cultural scripts

  2014cited by this paper
• Making knowledge visible in discourse: Implications for the study of linguistic evidentiality

  2013cited by this paper
• Interpersonal evidentiality: The Mandarin V-过 guo construction and other evidential systems beyond the ‘source of information’

  2013influential reference
• Did It Happen? The Pragmatic Complexity of Veridicality Assessment

  2012influential reference
• Notions of (inter)subjectivity

  2012cited by this paper
• Evidentiality in interaction: The concessive use of the Italian Future between grammar and discourse

  2012cited by this paper
• INHERITANCE, CONTACT AND CHANGE IN THE NEW GUINEA HIGHLANDS EVIDENTIALITY AREA

  2012cited by this paper
• The New Guinea Highlands evidentiality area

  2012cited by this paper
• The grammaticalization of evidentiality

  2011cited by this paper
• Analyzing linguistic data: a practical introduction to statistics using R

  2009cited by this paper
• Evidentials in Tibetan: acquisition, semantics, and cognitive development.

  2009cited by this paper
• Dizque, evidentiality, and stance in Valley Spanish

  2009cited by this paper
• Evidentiality and epistemic modality: On the close relationship between two different categories

  2009cited by this paper
• Antonymy and verbs of cognitive attitude: When know is the opposite of think and believe

  2008cited by this paper
• The construction of Mandarin VerbNet: A frame-based study of statement verbs

  2008cited by this paper
• UNNAMED SOURCES AS RHETORICAL CONSTRUCTS IN NEWS AGENCY REPORTS

  2008cited by this paper
• Assertoric commitment s

  2008cited by this paper
• Evidentiality in Chinese newspaper reports: subjectivity/objectivity as a factor

  2008influential reference
• Constructions of Intersubjectivity: Discourse, Syntax, and Cognition

  2007cited by this paper
• Evidentiality and double tense in Matses

  2007cited by this paper
• Evidentiality and Epistemic Modality at the Semantics/Pragmatics Interface ∗

  2006cited by this paper
• Subjectivity, evaluation and point of view in media discourse

  2004cited by this paper
• Mood and modality

  2004cited by this paper
• Evidentiality, logophoricity and the syntactic representation of pragmatic features

  2004cited by this paper
• TimeML: Robust Specification of Event and Temporal Expressions in Text

  2003cited by this paper
• Epistemic Stance in English Conversation: A Description of Its Interactional Functions, with a Focus on I Think

  2003cited by this paper
• Evidentiality and epistemological stance

  2001influential reference
• Epistemic marking and reliability judgments : Evidence from Bulgarian

  2001cited by this paper
• Subjectivity as an evidential dimension in epistemic modal expressions

  2001cited by this paper
• Evidentiality and deixis in narrative retelling

  2000cited by this paper
• Mirativity, evidentiality, mediativity, or other?

  1999cited by this paper
• Modality’s semantic map

  1998cited by this paper
• ‘‘Don't take my word for it.’’—understanding Chinese speaking practices

  1998cited by this paper
• A Cross-Linguistic Survey of the Grammaticization of Evidentiality

  1988influential reference
• Culture''s consequences: International di erence in work-related values

  1984cited by this paper
• The measurement of observer agreement for categorical data.

  1977cited by this paper
• A Coefficient of Agreement for Nominal Scales

  1960cited by this paper
• A Factuality Profiler for Eventualities in Text Dissertation Preview

  year unknowncited by this paper

• No citing papers are available for this paper.