Study on evidentiality in spoken Mandarin Chinese

Evidentiality codes the way speakers acquire knowledge of the information they talk about and their assessment of the reliability of that information. Researches have proved that evidentiality could exist in languages that even lack a clear evidential system, and all languages have ways of coding speakers´ assessment of the epistemological status of their information. Most of previous studies of evidentiality have been concentrated on English or other languages. Nevertheless, discussion of evidentiality in Chinese has been somewhat vacant. This paper aims to study the evidentiality in spoken Mandarin Chinese, and to explore the range of strategies that occur, thus we will be in a better position to understand how evidential meanings are encoded in Chinese natural language and the specific meaning of evidential linguistic forms.