Search results for " evidentiality"
showing 6 items of 6 documents
The Expression of Reality in Football News
2010
The notion of reality has been reanalyzed since the post-structuralism era as something socially and linguistically constructed. Language shapes reality, allowing the communication of ideas, theories and emotions through words. Through discourse, information is transferred and/or modified in the passages between addresser and addressee. In fact, the speaker may modify information in the transfer process by expressing commitment to the reality of his/her statement. Subjectivity thus becomes the key factor needed in order to understand reality as it is expressed in discourse. The data for this study is online texts drawn from the two major online newspapers and two football teams'' official n…
The translatability into Italian of the German stance marking modal particles wohl, eben and ja. Between epistemicity and evidentiality
2015
Contrary to Italian and many other languages, German has a linguistic means to mark the speaker’s stance: the so-called modal particles, such as wohl, eben and ja. This paper examines their occurrence in a German novel and their possible translations in its Italian version. It analyses their complex meaning arising from the intertwined relations between speaker – hearer – state of affairs as the three key entities of stance they mark and the textual or situational context, concluding that they have only covert epistemic and evidential features. This cross-linguistic analysis proves that it is impossible not only to translate them, but also to draw a clear borderline between epistemicity and…
Epistemic uses of the pretérito pluscuamperfecto in La Paz Spanish
2020
This paper explores epistemic-evidential uses of the pluperfect, i.e. pretérito pluscuamperfecto, in La Paz Spanish. The pretérito pluscuamperfecto displays functions of a reported evidential form, conforming to results from previous studies on Argentinian Spanish (Bermúdez 2008; Speranza 2014) and, furthermore, is used according to a previously unnoticed inferential evidential function. Using theoretical frameworks from Kockelman (1957) and Bergqvist (2018), this paper describes the configuration of participant roles and event types implied in the different evidential functions of the pretérito pluscuamperfecto.
Beyond Evidentiality. The epistemic function of the suffix -wa in Aymara
2021
In contrast to the specialized literature (Hardman 1986, 2001; Martinez-Vera 2020), this paper questions the direct evidential function of the sentence-type suffix -wa in «Northern Aymara» (Cerrón-Palomino 2000), an understudied Andean language spoken in the area around Lake Titicaca. By taking a narrow perspective on evidentiality, it proposes that -wa is a modal epistemic marker that indicates the speaker’s high commitment to information. Semantic considerations that support this proposal focus on both the interplay of -wa with other grammatical categories and its distribution within the sentence. Additionally, considerations on the scope properties of the suffix, as applied by Hengeveld …
Epistemic uses of the verb decir in La Paz Spanish Digamos and dice
2017
This paper explores semantic extensions and pragmatic functions of two evidential forms found in La Paz Spanish, digamos ‘let’s say’ and dice ‘s/he says’. Both forms are inflected forms of the verb decir ‘to say’. The form dice ‘s/he says’ has the function of a reported evidential form, conforming to results from previous studies (Babel 2009; Olbertz 2007; Travis 2006; Laprade 1981), while the form digamos is used according to a previously unnoticed function of an inferential evidential.
Health on the net: the doctor answers
2011
This study is intended to provide new insights into web-based discourse on medical exchanges in doctor-patient communication. The global net system have certainly played an important role in the increase and the following modification of communication dynamics. However, in particular situation such as doctor-patient interviews, computer mediated communication is still a limit. This paper is based on two lines of research in language studies, namely the studies of language corpus and studies of communication in health encounters. The corpus is formed by the medical entries that appeared in biomedical/health service sites. The samples collected were analysed in order to find discourse pattern…