A corpus-assisted study of evidential stance in selected Nigerian newspaper editorials

The present study is a corpus-assisted study of evidential stance in a specialised corpus of select Nigerian newspaper editorials: Punch, Tribune, The Guardian, This Day and Vanguard. The corpus has 1452 editorials, with 1,154,707 tokens. The data drawn was quantitatively analysed using AntConc 4.3.1 and qualitatively, following Hyland’s (2005) model of evidential stance, which categorises evidential stance into hedges and boosters. The results reveal that evidential stance has 161,432 instances, out of which hedges take 94,860 while boosters take only 66,572. The results also revealed that the linguistic categories used to express evidential stance in the editorials include: stance complement clauses controlled by adverbs, adjectives, verbs, modals and nouns. The higher usage of hedges over boosters indicate that writers of Nigerian newspaper editorials use constructions which indicate that they have added their own opinion and assumptions to the information presented. This way, they are able to protect not only themselves, but also their newspaper outfit, in the event of the eventual overthrow of their assumption. Over all, evidential stance has been used in the editorials to: reveal certainty and uncertainty of knowledge, reveal emotional commitment and viewpoint, gain acceptance from the public, and express solidarity with the public.