Spanish vs English mediated lectures: a contrastive approach to the use of evidential markers

Abstract

In the last ten years, Spanish universities have started to incorporate Englishas a means of instruction. As a consequence, many lecturers –who regularly usetheir mother tongue for their teaching activity– have adapted their syllabuscontents into English, resulting in lectures that show evidence of cross-linguisticinfluence (Odlin, 1993). The goal of this paper is to analyze the use anddistribution of evidentials in Spanish and English mediated lectures by the sameteachers and to evaluate the extent to which linguistic interference is madevisible when it comes to the use of evidentiality. To this aim, a corpus of threeEngineering lectures delivered in English and three Engineering lecturesdelivered in Spanish by the same native speakers of Spanish lecturers has beenused as a means of exemplification.