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Revista Española de Lingüística Aplicada/Spanish Journal of Applied Linguistics
Vol. 31:2 (2018) ► pp.520–549

The discourse functions of certainly and its Spanish counterparts in journalistic opinion discourse

| Universidad de León

This paper explores the discourse functions of certainly and its Spanish equivalents in the genre of newspaper opinion discourse. Certainty markers seem to have a presence intrinsic to the opinion genre and, therefore, are expected to “exhibit a certain uniformity across languages” (Dafouz, 2008, p. 110). Whereas the non-correspondence between certainly and ciertamente soon becomes apparent, the results of earlier studies (Ramón, 2009; Carretero, 2012) might well lead to the hypothesis that the PPs sin duda and desde luego realize in Spanish opinion articles the same discourse functions as certainly does in English newspapers. Drawing on naturally-occurring linguistic data from a corpus of English and Spanish opinion texts (C-OPRES), this study (1) investigates the non-correspondence between cognates and (2) explores the aforesaid research hypothesis. Finally, a translation corpus is used (P-ACTRES) to address the complex relationships between seemingly equivalent words, filling in the gaps of the contrastive analysis. The findings reveal a partial overlap between certainly and its Spanish counterparts as epistemic markers or in concessive contexts; whereas there are also significant differences in the distribution of other discourse functions, mainly regarding the emphasizing use of certainly and the grammaticalization of its so-called equivalents in Spanish as textual and/or interpersonal discourse markers.

Keywords: certainty adverbs, contrastive analysis, English/Spanish, newspaper opinon discourse, grammaticalization
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Theoretical background
    • 2.1Journalistic opinion discourse: A persuasive genre
    • 2.2Epistemic markers: The grammaticalization of adverbs of certainty
  • 3.Methodology and working procedure
    • 3.1Description of corpora
    • 3.2Working procedure
  • 4.‘Certainly’ and ‘ciertamente’ in newspaper opinion discourse
    • 4.1Scope and clausal position
    • 4.2Parentheticality
    • 4.3Discourse functions of ‘certainly’ and ‘ciertamente’
      • 1.Purely epistemic marker: Truth
      • 2.Emphasizer: Strengthening or intensifying function
      • 3.Concessive function
      • 4.Discourse marker: Interpersonal and/or textual function
      • 5.Response marker: Emphatic agreement
  • 5.‘Certainly’ and its Spanish counterparts: ‘Sin duda’ and ‘desde luego’
    • 5.1Scope and clausal position
    • 5.2Parentheticality
    • 5.3Discourse functions and uses of ‘certainly’ and its Spanish equivalents ‘sin duda’ and ‘desde luego’
  • 6.Translation as a tool for cross-linguistic research: The Spanish counterparts of ‘certainly’ as an emphasizer
  • 7.Concluding remarks
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References

Article language: Spanish

Published online: 27 December 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/resla.16026.per
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