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Tense, Aspect, Modality, and Evidentiality: Crosslinguistic perspectives
Edited by Dalila Ayoun, Agnès Celle and Laure Lansari
[Studies in Language Companion Series 197] 2018
► pp. 109–144

Chapter 6
Expressing sources of information, knowledge and belief in English and Spanish informative financial texts

| Universidad Complutense de Madrid
| Universidad a Distancia de Madrid (UDIMA)

This chapter presents a qualitative and quantitative analysis of expressions of sources of information, knowledge and belief and their combination with grammaticalized devices of future time from the perspective of the present and the past (‘will’, ‘would’ and their Spanish equivalents) in a corpus of English and Spanish informative financial texts belonging to two levels of specialization. The qualitative analysis describes the expressions concerned and their use in the corpus. The quantitative analysis uncovers the influence of language and level of specialization on the relative frequency of different expressions of source of information, knowledge and belief, a tendency for future time devices to occur within their scope, and a positive relation between the relative frequencies of both kinds of expressions.

Keywords: financial texts, reporting, epistemic modality, evidentiality, future time
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction and structure of the chapter
  • 2.Description of the corpus
  • 3.Expressions of source of information, knowledge and belief: A qualitative analysis
    • 3.1Expressions of epistemicity
      • 3.1.1 Epistemic modal expressions
      • 3.1.2Evidential expressions
    • 3.2Reporting expressions
    • 3.3Contexts of exclusion
  • 4. Expressions of future time: English ‘will’ and ‘would’ and their Spanish equivalents
  • 5. The data gathering
  • 6.Results and discussion
    • 6.1Overall frequency of the expressions of information, knowledge and belief in the four subcorpora
    • 6.2Frequency of ‘will/would’ and their Spanish equivalents within the scope of other expressions of information, knowledge and belief
    • 6.3Correlation between total number of expressions and the frequency of ‘will’/‘would’ and their Spanish equivalents
  • 7.Conclusions and suggestions for further research
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Appendix
  • References
Published online: 2 August 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.197.06car
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