This paper addresses two key issues in the study of discursive constructions: the strategic use of ‘justificatory support’ aimed at the legitimisation of assertions, and the mystification of responsibility for epistemic stance acts in the discourse. The paper argues that the use of epistemic stance resources contributes to the speaker's strategic aim of legitimising assertions, which plays an indirect role in the legitimisation of actions. An additional dimension of legitimisation is the inter/subjective anchoring of these stance acts, which by default (...) index the speaker as conceptualiser, thus assigning responsibility and accountability for the validity of the communicated information. This paper explores these issues and presents results on the stancetaking patterns and the expression of subjectivity and intersubjectivity in the discourse of a parliamentary inquiry and a public inquiry. (shrink)

This article explores the use of epistemic stance strategies in journalistic discourse in English and Spanish. The linguistic resources of epistemic stance include evidential and modal expressions, as well as verbs of cognitive attitude and expressions of factivity. This article examines the pattern of distribution of epistemic stance expressions in three types of journalistic genres in English and Spanish and the presence of multifunctionality of some evidential expressions in the two languages. The article aims to reveal possible similarities or differences (...) in the use of the stance resources in the various genres and across languages. (shrink)

This article studies the function of the verbs seem and parecer with an evidential meaning in early medical writing in a time span of two centuries. The texts for analysis are excerpted from the Corpus of Early Modern English Medical Texts in the case of English and the Corpus diacrónico del español in the case of Spanish. My hypothesis is that the forms seem and parecer are mainly evidential rather than epistemic, as suggested in the works of Johansson and Aijmer, (...) since they primarily report on the speaker’s role in the formulation of predication. In this sense, the use of seem shows the way in which information has been obtained. Source of knowledge identification and attribution are important in medical prose because writers tend to make manifest that their information is based on demonstrable grounds, including inferential processes. My notion of evidentiality draws on the work of Cornillie and is essentially disjunctive. This means that the association of mode/source of knowledge with varying degrees of certainty and truth does not always take place. This study also allows for cross-cultural and cross-linguistic conclusions in terms of frequency, motivation and use of these evidential verbs in historical texts. (shrink)