Do readers perceive various types of knowledge expressed through evidentials in news reports with different degrees of certainty?

Abstract In the written medium, evidentiality encodes intersubjective knowledge shared between the writer and a third party who is also aware of the events occurring at the time. Journalists often use evidential markers to convey this intersubjective knowledge to readers in news reporting. Such knowledge helps to mitigate journalists’ assertiveness and enables readers to reconstruct the reported information. This study examines readers’ judgments of the knowledge expressed through various types of evidential categories in news reports. Sentences were retrieved from English and Chinese corpora, constructed in previous studies, containing news events presented with evidential markers and accompanied by readers’ certainty judgments regarding these events. The evidential markers are annotated into six categories commonly observed across languages from a typological perspective. Both quantitative and qualitative analyses are conducted to examine differences in the distributions of English and Chinese readers’ judgments across these evidential categories. Additionally, potential factors influencing how readers of different languages perceive news events are identified. This study empirically contributes to understanding whether different types of knowledge are perceived differently across languages.