PERTANIKA JOURNAL OF SOCIAL SCIENCES AND HUMANITIES

By taking a mixed-methods research design and in a comparative corpus, the present study explored evidentials use in empirical articles in four disciplines: Applied Linguistics, Psychology, Environmental Engineering, and Chemistry. The study aimed to investigate the extent to which writers belonging to different communities vary in their strategic use of evidence markers in written academic discourse. To this end, a representative sample of 80 research articles written in the selected disciplines comprised the corpus of the study. The functional-contextual analysis reported significant cross-disciplinary variations in the writers' rhetorical behavior of using evidentials in their writings. Notable variations were found in the discursive functions of evidentials used in the sampled research articles. The variations could be attributed to the amount of rhetorical sensitivity to and awareness of purpose, disciplinary propensities, and the tendencies of the disciplinary genre. The present findings can be helpful in the teaching and learning of academic writing and may give some insights to rhetorical practices of members in the disciplinary communities studied.