Evidence of 'evidentiality' in the quality press 1993 and 2005

This chapter discusses an analysis of two large newspaper corpora (100m and 45m words) using a diachronic approach within the framework of corpus-assisted discourse studies. The aim was to examine and compare the expression of evidentiality (Bednarek, 2006; Dendale, 2001; Chafe, 1986) that is, how the writer’s knowledge is marked as having been ‘seen’ or ‘heard’, etc., how the knowledge is attributed, and how it is passed on to the reader, and how evidentiality may have changed over a period marked by major upheavals in news practice. Findings show an increased use of evidential markers over the thirteen-year period studied, and, at the same time, a shift in reporter usage of evidentiality towards hearsay evidence and the reporting of knowledge acquired by speculation. This is in keeping with other observations regarding an increased ‘vagueness’ in contemporary journalism which is counterbalanced at times with an elevation of the newsworker’s presence.