In a previous paper (Philip et al. 2013) we presented the analysis of the main characters’ identities, as they emerge from the dialogues in Chapter 10 of the seventh book of the Harry Potter series, in relation to their Knowing, Unknowing, and Believing epistemic stances. The aim of the present… read more
The communication of the uncertainty of a scientific finding largely determines whether that information will be translated to practice. Unfortunately, however, our ability to study these phenomena is restrained since existing uncertainty corpora are limited in their number of full text articles… read more
In this paper we present the analysis of uncertainty markers in a corpus of 60 articles randomly selected from the German popular science magazine
Spektrum der Wissenschaft since 1993 until 2012. In addition to identifying which and how many uncertainty lexical and morphosyntactic markers were… read more
According to the cognitive approach to humour, understanding of humorous texts implies a moment of surprise, even confusion of thought, produced by the recognition of an incongruity, defined as an incoherent piece of the text. The problem solving activity involved in humor understanding aims at… read more
The aim of this paper was to analyze the 109 occurrences of Italian come se “as if” in a homogenous written corpus of 780 texts, with the aim to highlight the implied evidential and epistemic aspects, not yet explicitly studied in the pertinent literature. We used an interdisciplinary approach… read more
In this study, we compare three approaches to epistemic stance: Akio Kamio’s Theory of Territories of Information (intended as a bridge between evidentiality and politeness) and his distinction between direct and indirect forms of utterances; John Heritage’s differentiation between epistemic status… read more
Within the framework of KUB Theory (Bongelli and Zuczkowski 2008, Zuczkowski et al. 2011), information communicated verbally can ultimately be reduced to one of three categories: what the speaker knows (Known), what the speaker does not know (Unknown) and what the speaker believes (Believed).… read more
In the present study we analysed the lexical and morphosyntactic markers that communicate Certainty or Uncertainty and their pragmatic functions, in a corpus of contemporary Italian political discourses, both speeches and dialogues broadcast on television. The exemplary analysis of two speeches… read more
Following the definition of ‘interior monologue’ (IM) given by Edouard Dujardin (1931), we analysed a corpus of novels (by Schnitzler, Joyce, Dostoevsky, Pirandello) in which this literary technique is used. We discovered that, although one of the conventional meanings of monologue is ‘discourse… read more