Search results for "Epistemic modality"

Epistemic Modality Variation in Community Law Journals

2012

Over the last decades the attention of scholars working in the filed of academic discourse has been directed towards language variation, and academic writing is not any more considered as a consistent and homogeneous form of discourse. The importance traditionally given to the consensual and static aspects of disciplinary communication has been coupled with the emphasis increasingly placed to the analysis of interactions/practices/activities that sustain discourse communities. According to the sociolinguist approach, genres become ‘dynamically rhetorical structures’ that can be manoeuvred according to the discipline’s norms, values and ideology, both historically and incrementally changing …

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…

On Conditions Instantiating Tip Effects of Epistemic and Evidential Meanings in Bulgarian

2012

Статья посвящена условиям, при которых происходит попеременная актуализация то эвиденциального, то эпистемического компонента в семантическом потенциале эвиденциальных показателей болгарского языка. Сосредоточиваясь на сентенциальных наречиях с инферентивными функциями, мы опираемся на следующие предпосылки: (i) для каждой единицы следует отличать её устойчивое семантическое значение от прагматического потенциала, выявлению которого способствуют (или препятствуют) те или иные коммуникативные условия; (ii) эвиденциальные и эпистемические компоненты значения довольно легко вытесняют друг друга из позиции доминанты, причём процесс подавления то одного, то другого компонента обусловлен действие…

Sense Activation Triggering in English Epistentials: Attention Distribution, Contextual Modulation of Meaning, and Categorization Issues

2015

Drawing on Talmy’s forthcoming The Attention System of Language and elaborating on a series of previous studies, this paper addresses the interrelation of attention distribution, contextual modulation of meaning, and categorization issues in the area of evidentiality and epistemic modality Adopting a corpus-based approach, it will investigate how the default salience levels of evidential and epistemic semantic components in so-called epistentials (linguistic items that syncretistically represent evidential and epistemic components) can be raised, lowered, or even inhibited under the impact of immediately adjacent items that themselves associate evidential or epistemic semantic components (i…

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 …

Chapter 7. Evidentiality and epistemic modality in Old Catalan

2018

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.

Modalność epistemiczna w ustnych wypowiedziach maturzystów

2016

In this article the author analyses components of the epistemic modality, by means of which a student assesses the accuracy of views presented during the oral matriculation examination in the Polish language. Considering the specificity of spoken utterances during the oral matriculation examination, the epistemic modality can be defined as all kinds of information on an intellectual attitude of the speaker who, on the basis of his/her own knowledge and thinking processes which are taking place in his/her mind al a given moment, makes a “gradable” assessment of a view’s reliability. The analysed texts differ depending on the level of certainty of their authors as far as the communicated cont…

Epistemic Modality Markers in European and American Law Journals

2013

Over the last decades the attention of scholars working in the filed of social sciences has been directed towards language variation, and discourse analysis has increasingly evolved as a valuable way of understanding the use of language in a variety of academic, institutional and professional settings (Clyne 1994; Flowerdew & Gotti 2006; Bhatia et al. 2008). According to the sociolinguist approach, genres become ‘dynamically rhetorical structures’ that can be manoeuvred according to the discipline’s norms, values and ideology, both historically and incrementally changing as disciplinary knowledge and genres required and created by discourse communities’ change (Bhatia 2004; Hyland 2004,…

Modality and Injunctive in Homeric Greek: the case of counterfactual and epistemic constructions

Homeric unaugmented aorists and imperfects are the oldest verbal forms attested in Greek, which continue the so-called Indo-European ‘injunctives’. The latter were inflectionally underspecified as regards verbal categories such as tense or mood (Hoffmann 1967; Kiparsky 1968). Thus, the question arises as to how the attitude of the speaker towards the content of his utterance was expressed. The aim of this paper is to investigate the role of epistemic particles co-occurring with injunctives in the Iliad and the Odyssey, focusing in particular on past counterfactual constructions. Crosslinguistic studies have shown that such modal constructions reflect the universal semantic distinction betwe…