More Than an Information Source: A Bibliometric Review of Evidential Studies (1992–2021)

As a linguistic phenomenon with information sources as its core semantic content, evidentiality has received much academic attention. Based on data from Web of Science (WOS) 1992 to 2021, this study performed bibliometric analysis track the changes and characteristics evidential studies, focusing number published papers, prolific authors, journals institutions, highly cited literature. Our findings indicated that (1) last 40 years have seen significant increase in interest studies; (2) authors exhibit strong connections high-yield institutions; (3) United States Spain are top two most influential contributors (4) research mostly centred theoretical, typological, semantic, pragmatic studies evidentiality. Finally, traced topics over past 30 proposed future directions for studies. This suggested should investigate various languages establish more inclusive typology further enrich semantics well focus diversified genres broader social contexts.