How do we know what we know? - evidentiality in British quality newspapers

The newspaper reader is invited to accept information on the grounds that it has been verified, is true and is compatible with events as they took place. The implication of any news reporting is that a form of mediation has taken place, whether explicitly or not, and the presence of the writer/speaker is evident to a greater or lesser degree, accompanying the story. Since the principal role of newspapers is to inform, then it follows that we should investigate how it informs, that is, whether the writer witnessed or heard, or whether the information being transmitted is general knowledge or inference. This paper reports some findings from a wider project involving a diachronic analysis of two large corpora of British quality papers regarding evidentiality, that is, how newspapers writers report their knowledge of events and how this information was acquired. Preliminary quantitative analyses allowed categories of evidentiality to be individuated, and these were analysed further using qualitative methods, concordancing patterns in particular, to investigate how markers are used by newspaper writers according to they type of evidentiality used.