Pragmatics and Society - Volume 9, Issue 3, 2018

This article provides an insight into the expression of reportative evidentiality in Spanish scientific articles published between 1799 and 1920. Central to the discussion is the presence and specificity of sources in reportative constructions. While contemporary scientific discourse prioritizes the use of specific, reportative-quotative evidentials, this is not a constant feature of articles analyzed in this study. In order to trace this historical variation, we established a classification of reportative constructions according to the specificity of the evidence they convey and we conducted both qualitative and quantitative analyses. According to our results, different specificity patterns were prominent in different temporal stages of the period under review. We argue that this can be interpreted in light of the growth and changing practices of the scientific community.

Narratives of severe mental illness can be regarded as the discursive efforts of a healthy self to restore a sense of selfhood disrupted by the illness. Focusing on a sample of 87 unsolicited online illness narratives of eating disorders in Spanish, this article explores how narrators deployed evidential constructions introduced by the perception verb “ver” (to see) to manage identity in the autobiographical telling. The analysis revealed that “ver” indexed information as coming from different sources (perception, mental states, inference). This evidential material was discursively evaluated (via the adoption of a specific epistemic stance) and applied to construe conflicting versions of self in the eating disorder narratives. Resorting to the evidential marking, narrators could rhetorically negotiate the transition from their perceptual self, created during the illness, to their cognitive self, elaborated in the recovery.

This article analyses the function of the multiword lexeme ya me dirás tú as used in Internet forums. We defend the notion that ya me dirás tú is a highly polyphonic discourse marker. Its function is evidential as of the moment in which the speaker uses this unit to present a subjective appraisal as a logical truth within the framework of an assertion. We therefore focus on evidentiality from not only a lexical but also a textual-discursive standpoint. Internet forums are the ideal type of text for studying a unit like ya me dirás tú, which is typically used in colloquial language.

The aim of this paper is twofold. First, it aims to delve into the influence of contextual discursive factors in determining the type of evidential chosen and the pragmatic functions developed by evidentials in Spanish parliamentary discourse; second, it shows how evidentials can also provide useful new insight on the genre. A corpus study has been carried out studying the Spanish evidential discourse marker al parecer in parliamentary debates. The analysis shows how real examples of al parecer hardly fit any category of evidentials posited previously; data also illustrates how factors such as the discursive role or the part of the parliamentary process do affect the meaning of al parecer and change the pragmatic nuances conveyed by the discourse marker.

This paper aims to study the different types and pragmatic functions of the Spanish evidential forms found in four discursive genres, in order to observe if any restrictions apply. All the evidentials are studied in a corpus containing 100,000 words, evenly distributed over colloquial conversations, press news, academic papers, and parliamentary debates. Specifically, together with the pragmatic functions of these evidentials, the four dimensions mode of knowing, type of source, accessibility, and degree of precision are analysed. The results reveal different tendencies in the use of evidentials, depending on the genre, and support the claim that the behaviour of evidentials is conditioned by the specific characteristics of each genre.

This conversation analytic study examines the interaction coordinated between two amateur tour guides and a guided visitor for initiating departure from various objects during a campus tour managed through Japanese as a lingua franca. The data come from a 40-minute tour at a Taiwanese university in which two Taiwanese students acted as guides for one American professor. The resulting analysis revealed the guided visitor’s active role in determining departure from focal objects through deployment of assessments and bodily movements. This study supports findings from previous research on various languages by providing empirical evidence that the following two phenomena are highly consistent across languages and that they hold true even in lingua franca interaction: (1) assessments are routinely deployed to close a sequence; and (2) assessments are made recognizable as initiating closings when they act in concert with sequential positioning, bodily movements, the environmental context, and objects in the immediate surround.