An EvidentialityDiscourse Analysis of Adverbials and Epistemic Modality in Discussion Sections of Native and NonNative ELT Papers

Integrating the triplex notion of evidentiality into its theoretical framework, this study aimed at contrastively scrutinizing the ELT academic papers authored by nonnative Iranian and native English researchers in terms of the utilization of evidentiality, focusing on the adverbial and epistemicmodality types. To this end, the discussion sections of 20 online papers were randomly selected from both groups. Then, postulating Ifantidou’s model (2001) as its analytical framework, this investigation identified the other evidentiality types in the collected corpora, and then classified them into appropriate subtypes based on the subcategories of the model. Furthermore, the frequency and the rate of evidentials in each group were compared and contrasted to see their rate differences. The findings indicated that the “adverbial” type of evidentiality enjoyed the firstranked frequency, and the “epistemic modality” was the fourth frequentlyused type of evidentiality in both native and nonnative ELT papers. The other frequent types of evidentiality in these papers included “inferring,” “reported,” “memory,” and “propositional attitude,” respectively, which were not the types this study concentrated on. Finally, it was observed that there were subtle differences in both the degree and the way these authors draw evidentiality in their papers.