Evidentiality in Opinion Articles on South African’s Case Against Israel at the International Court of Justice: A Metadiscourse Approach

Abstract

Many studies have been carried out on the employment of evidentiality as a linguistic resource that helps in adding credibility to the information presented by writers. However, while evidentiality has been explored as a metadiscoursal device being employed in academic writings, little is known about its employment as a persuasive strategy in argumentative texts such as opinion articles. The aim of this study is to examine the employment of evidentiality by South African opinion article writers regarding Israel-Gaza War and South African’s case against Israel at the International Court of Justice regarding the war. Ten opinion articles were selected from four South African online newspapers and Dehkordi and Allami’s (2012) classification of evidentiality was used for the analysis. Findings reveal that in the texts analysed, South African opinion article writers employed evidentiality as metadiscourse marker in their texts, and that three of the five identified categories of evidentiality were employed while the other two categories were not employed. Also, specific direct and specific indirect evidentiality were more significantly used than the other categories of evidentiality. This indicates that South African opinion article writers value the employment of evidentiality as a metadiscoursal marker to reference and attribute their claims in order to persuade their readers.