Author(s)

Bai Bingqiao ¹

Affiliation(s)

¹ School of English, Xi'an International Studies University, Xi'an, China

Corresponding Author

Bai Bingqiao

ABSTRACT

On March 23rd, the House Energy and Commerce Committee conducted a hearing with the CEO of TikTok, Shou Chew, focused on TikTok's consumer privacy and data security practices, its impact on children, and its relationship with the Chinese Communist Party. The hearing was titled "TikTok: How Congress Can Safeguard American Data Privacy and Protect Children from Online Harms.". After the hearing, which lasted more than five hours, people were abuzz about Mr. Chou's performance. This paper applies to the method of conversational analysis to analyze the distribution and linguistic features of the evidentiality in Shou Chew's response, so as to discover the pragmatic function and communicative effect behind it. Through the analysis of our data, the research questions are as follows: (1) What is the distribution of the five evidentials in the Mr. Chou's response? (2) How can they be reflected in the response? (3) What pragmatic functions and communicative effects does its use reflect? It is found that the distribution is uneven, among which thinferential and imaginative comparingly have higher proportion. The linguistic forms of evidential are not restricted to specific words, but also involve the use of phrases. They serve three functions: persuading others, enhancing reliability, and creating friendly relationships.

KEYWORDS

Evidentiality; conversational analysis; pragmatic function

CITE THIS PAPER

Bai Bingqiao, A Study of Evidentiality and Its Pragmatic Functions in Shou Chew's Response. Lecture Notes on Language and Literature (2024) Vol. 7: 127-132. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.23977/langl.2024.070519.

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