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Part of
Corpora in Translation and Contrastive Research in the Digital Age: Recent advances and explorations
Edited by Julia Lavid-López, Carmen Maíz-Arévalo and Juan Rafael Zamorano-Mansilla
[Benjamins Translation Library 158] 2021
► pp. 233–256

Chapter 9
Variation of evidential values in discourse domains

A contrastive corpus-based study (English and Spanish)

ORCID logo | Universidad Complutense de Madrid

This paper examines the variation of evidential values in oral conversation and written journalistic discourse in English and Spanish. The study focuses on indirect inferential and reportative values of evidentiality, and on the multifunctionality of a number of evidential expressions derived from the perceptual, conceptual and communicative experiential domains. The paper presents results of a contrastive corpus-based study on the expression of evidentiality, and on the multifunctionality of core evidential expressions (verbs and sentence adverbs). It is argued that variation in the use of particular values of evidentiality is sensitive to discourse domains and genres, and that multifunctionality would appear to favour expressions derived from the perceptual domain.

Keywords: evidentiality, multifunctionality, corpus annotation, comparable corpora
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Evidentiality and multifunctionality
    • 2.1Evidentiality
    • 2.2Classification of evidential expressions
    • 2.3Multifunctionality
  • 3.Methodology
    • 3.1Hypotheses and research objectives
    • 3.2Corpora and object of analysis: Evidential expressions
    • 3.3Criteria for the analysis of evidential expressions
    • 3.4Procedure of annotation
  • 4.Results and discussion
    • 4.1Results for evidential values, experiential domains, and discourse domains and genres in English
    • 4.2Results for evidential values, experiential domains, and discourse domains and genres in Spanish
    • 4.3Discussion: Comparison of Results in English and Spanish
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Dictionaries
  • References
Published online: 8 December 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/btl.158.09mar
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