Evidentiality and epistemic modality in English and Spanish medical scientific papers: A contrastive study

Abstract

This paper explores the concepts of evidentiality and epistemic modality in a corpus of English and Spanish medical scientific discourse. The data for analysis are taken from Evycorpe, a database of English scientific papers in the fields of computing, medicine and law published between 1998-2008. For the present work, I have only used the medical papers, but the results will be implemented with the other two register subdomains in the future. The Spanish medical corpus has been gathered for this contrastive study following the same Evycorpe criteria of compilation. The notions of epistemic modality and evidentiality are differently treated in the literature. Whereas for some scholars evidentiality represents a subdomain of epistemic modality, there are others who consider evidentiality as an independent category. Epistemic modality is strongly connected to the idea of “truth” and the authors’ responsibility concerning their statements (Traugott 1989; Sweetser 1990; Stukker, Sanders and Verhagen 2009). Evidentiality is seen as the coding of the authors’ “source of knowledge”, and this may eventually imply differing degrees of certainty concerning the proposition manifested. In this fashion, Dendale and Tasmowski (2001) argue that the relation between these two concepts divides into disjunction, inclusion, and intersection. In the strictest sense, evidentiality conveys no more than evidence about the source of information, i.e. disjunction. Cornillie (2009) follows this disjunctive type, and he argues that the mode of knowing should not be associated with the degree of authors’ commitment towards their texts. For Palmer (2001), evidentiality is a subcategory of epistemic modality, i.e. inclusion. Finally, scholars such as Chafe (1986), van der Auwera and Plungian (1998), Mushin (2001), and Carretero (2004) follow the intersective approach, and this implies an overlap between inferential evidentiality and epistemic necessity. In this paper, I follow an intersective approach and, although both categories are theoretically distinct, they undergo functional overlapping. The use of these strategies might be indexical of the authors’ position and intention in discourse (Marín Arrese 2009). This said, my main objectives are: (a) to identify and classify cases of epistemic and evidential markers in English and Spanish in the first place, and (b) to describe their frequency of occurrence in each language subcorpus and their functions within discourse, mainly as stance markers. The paper concludes that epistemic markers appear in higher frequency in the English texts, whereas the Spanish ones tend to show more examples of evidential strategies, although in both cases these marker types aim to mitigate potential FTAs among other pragmatic effects.