The role of epistemic stance markers in a corpus of Galician and Spanish newspapers
The aim of this paper is to analyze the epistemic stance in a corpus of opinion articles from Galician and Spanish newspapers. The corpus is related to humanitarian crises and immigration in Europe.
To examine the way in which the speaker positions him/herself (epistemic stance) and tries to persuade the reader of his/her conception of reality, we follow Marín-Arrese (2021) and Carretero et al. (2017) epistemic stance proposal. According to this model, epistemic stance is divided into several subcategories: epistemic modality, evidentiality, factivity, cognitive attitude, ignorative attitude, marked enunciational positioning and reformulation of information. The difference between personal and impersonal expression of these categories is also examined. With a methodology of quantitative and qualitative corpus analysis, we answer the question of how the frequency of use of these subcategories contribute to conveying the positioning and persuasive purposes of the writer. The aim of the study is to try to determine whether there is a language preference for a specific category of the above, either in its personal or impersonal form. This preference results in a cultural communicative style. At the same time, the prevalence of a specific category implies the speaker’s implicit estimation of the greater persuasiveness of that category and of the communicative style employed.
References
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Marín-Arrese, J.I. (2021). Winds of War: Epistemic and effective control in political discourse. Cultura, Lenguaje y Representación, Vol. XXVI, 289-307.