The Use of Evidentials in Tourism Research Papers

Abstract

The present study deals with the use of evidentials in a corpus of introductions and conclusions of research articles in the field of tourism. I use a compilation of article introductions and conclusions in English. These texts have been published in specialized leading journals in the field of tourism. Our perspective of evidentials follows from Hyland’s definition of the term as a metadiscourse device, i.e. the identification of responsibility for specific authorial positions (Hyland 2005: 50–51). Evidentials normally refer to the sources scholars deploy in order to specify responsibility for some claims. In this particular paper, we seek to evaluate the use and functions of evidentials in the introductions and conclusions of research papers. Research will be performed using corpus tools for text analysis and retrieval. Our conclusion will report on the form and these devices and the way in which they are deployed in the texts analysed, and the pragmatic functions developed by the use of these devices in these sections of the academic papers will also be described.