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Article published In:
Current Visions of TAML2: Tense, Aspect and Modality in Second Languages
Edited by Paz González and Tim Diaubalick
[Dutch Journal of Applied Linguistics 8:1] 2019
► pp. 84–99

Speaker’s stance and subjectivity in the epistemic modal and evidential use of the Spanish imperfecto in journalistic texts

| Universität Potsdam

This study contributes to the analysis of the epistemic modal and evidential use of the Spanish imperfecto with regard to the speaker’s stance and subjectively (rather than grammatically) motivated decision to use the Spanish imperfecto as an evidential strategy in journalistic texts: The speaker uses the Spanish imperfecto to express or tell a state of affairs from his perspective as a ‘narrator’, implying that he is not the author of such information and referring to third sources without mentioning it. The corpus data were obtained from the Corpus de la Real Academia Española (CREA) from the section ‘written journalistic texts’ of the standard Iberian Spanish to guarantee the authenticity of examples and avoid any case of misunderstanding it as a variety of Spanish.

Keywords: Spanish imperfecto , aspectuality, epistemic modality, evidentiality, journalistic texts, corpus analysis, functional linguistics
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Starting point for the epistemic modal and evidential use of the Spanish imperfecto
    • 2.1Aspectual indeterminancy
    • 2.2Past tenses developed into evidentials
  • 3.Methodology
  • 4.Analysis and results of the epistemic modal and evidential use of the Spanish imperfecto under the speaker’s subjective perspective to mark implicitly an external source of information
    • 4.1The Spanish imperfecto with the verbs morir (‘to die’), estallar (‘to explode’), ascender (‘to rise’) and pagar (‘to pay’)
    • 4.2The Spanish imperfecto with ‘verbs of saying’
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Published online: 11 March 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/dujal.19012.boh
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