Introductory Words as Markers of Indirect Evidentiality in the Discourse of the Chinese Foreign Policy Initiative “Belt and Road”

Indicating the source of information is a necessary element of political discourse texts. It is associated with a new linguistic phenomenon, the category of evidentiality. The relevance of this work is derived from the insufficient study by the scientific community of the indirect evidentiality markers, and the ways of their representation in the discursive space. The aim of the chapter is to identify the specifics of the functioning of introductory words as means of expressing indirect evidentiality in the Chinese-language political media discourse. The research material is based on the articles from the newspaper Zhenmin Zhibao (People’s Daily) dedicated to the Chinese foreign policy initiative “Belt and Road”. Such a large-scale economic project, put forward in 2013 by the Chairman of the People’s Republic of China Xi Jinping, has shown successful implementation over a ten-year path of its development. This was facilitated by its information support provided by the media. Among them, it is Zhenmin Zhibao that acts as the main promoter of the “Belt and Road” initiative, and contributes to its popularization on the world stage. The work used discourse analysis, component analysis, structural-semantic, descriptive, interpretive methods, as well as a continuous sampling method. Introductory words indicating the source of information were analyzed within the framework of structural-semantic classification. The analysis of empirical material showed that of these, the most frequent are prepositional constructs with “据”, which tend to take a position at the beginning of the sentence. The preposition is followed by a reference link to statistics, surveys or bank reports. The chapter concludes that in the texts of the Chinese-language political discourse covering the foreign policy initiative, introductory words are the most common means of representing the quotative meaning of indirect evidentiality with the indication of a specific or indefinite source of information, in some cases the source of information may be absent.