Evidential and epistemic devices in English and Spanish medical, computing and legal scientific abstracts: A contrastive study

Abstract

This chapter explores the categories of evidentiality, i.e. the mode of knowing, and epistemic modality, i.e. judgements about truth, in a corpus of English and Spanish abstracts in the fields of medicine, computing and law written between 1998-2008 by native speakers of both languages. This compilation is already tagged for genre features, and is interrogated using the Onicomt corpus tool (Online Interface for Corpus Management). The analyses are based on the works of Plungian (2001), Marín-Arrese (2009), and Cornillie (2009), among others, which will allow me to establish a differentiation between what is evidential and what is exclusively epistemic in the lexicon and the grammar of research paper abstracts.

There is an ongoing debate in the literature as to whether evidential and epistemic categories are two of a kind, or whether they ← 21 | 22 → represent distinct concepts (see De Haan 1999; Dendale/Tasmowski 2001). Many scholars, such as Palmer (1991), opt for an inclusive interpretation of evidentiality, and hence consider it a subdomain of epistemic modality. Others, including Cornillie (2009), follow a disjunctive approach, and view evidentiality as a separate category bearing no direct relation on the truth of the proposition manifested. This study has two main objectives: (a) to analyze and categorize evidential and epistemic markers in our corpus of English and Spanish abstracts, and (b) to see whether these strategies...