Evidentiality in Political Discourse: Analysing Speakers’ Stance and Ideology through Appraisal Theory

The study attempts to investigate the comparison between the frequency and distribution of sources and types of evidentiality and the function of evidential markers as stance makers and ideology construction. Although evidentiality is the main subject in a wide range of studies, the domain has not been discussed in the Pakistani political context. Therefore, specialized corpora containing 5 speeches of Pakistan’s former Prime Minister Imran Khan and 5 speeches of American President Joe Biden have been compiled for the analysis. The study employs a mixed-method approach. The data has been analyzed first via Antconc software that has been used to locate the frequency and distribution of evidential markers, and later, The Appraisal Theory of Martin and White (2005) has been applied to analyze the pragmatic function of the linguistic markers through its resources such as ‘engagement’. The findings indicate that both speakers have made use of personal knowledge (PK) evidentials from an inside source more frequently. Imran Khan in his speeches has used ‘I think’, ‘I believe’, and ‘unfortunately’, whereas Biden has used ‘I know’, ‘in my view’, and ‘it is clear’ more frequently. The study has suggested that while making claims, the speakers have often taken personal responsibility and have shown their strong confidence towards the truth of the proposition. Secondly, they often present subjective stance and positive self-representations towards the audience. This research study contributes to the field of corpus linguistics and to the practice of discourse community with the analysis of linguistic expressions in the speeches.