The functions of evidential markers

This study sets forth from the fact that in communication while rendering information the speaker/writer indicates his/her personal emotions, beliefs and attitudes towards the source and the degree of reliability of the information, and seeks to answer the questions `With what grammatical structures are evidential markers encoded in scientific texts produced in the field of social sciences in Turkish?? and `What kind of discursive functions do they fulfill?? in order to test the basic hypothesis designated as `evidential markers function to objectify subjectivity depending upon the ideology, consequently upon the tradition of producing texts within the field of social sciences (history, geography, art history, sociology, psychology, philosophy, linguistics). To answer these research questions a corpus was built from the texts published in academic journals by stratified random sampling and analyzed within the theoretical frame of Systemic- Functional Grammar.The findings we obtained from the analysis exhibit what linguistic structures writers employ systematically to reflect their attitudes towards information in Turkish scientific texts produced in the field of social sciences and what the distribution of these evidential markers is in indicating subjectivity, objectivity or inter-subjectivity. These findings also shed light on the evaluation of ideological reasons underlying the language used in scientific texts under discussion. Accordingly, our study claims that evidential markers play a role in blurring subjectivity, thus promoting objectivity in texts within the field of social sciences. The choices made in relation to evidential markers are governed by the concern to obtain prestige by means of conformity to the dominant scientific paradigm.