Evidentiality and stance in medical research papers

Abstract

Our paper addresses two main issues related to the concept of evidentiality. The first one refers to the lack of studies in the field in English, especially as for the grammatical marking of evidentiality. Some authors (Lazard, 2001) claim that English does not hold grammatical markers for the source of knowledge in contrast to other languages, e.g. Quechua, which seems to do so. Dendale and Tasmowski (2001), however, think that grammatical evidentials are possible in English, and that more research should be done in order to identify and categorize these. The second issue deals with the relationship of evidentiality and stance. Evidentiality understood in its broad sense allows for the interpretation of authorial intention and degree of certainty in their use of expressions indicating their sources of knowledge. In our view, the use of evidential marking rarely is free from the imprint of the author, and hence other meanings rather than sources of knowledge should be taken into account. In our study we will concentrate on modal verbs to show (i) their value as grammatical evidential markers, and (ii) their value as stance markers to show the author’s attitude to the proposition manifested. For this, we use a corpus of about 30 medical research papers published in 2008.