This paper investigates lexical evidentials in an English corpus (30 texts) about oil drilling issues in the Adriatic Sea. Lexical evidentials (e.g. see, must, find, evidently) indicate “the kind of justification for a factual claim which is available to the person making that claim […]” (Anderson 1986: 274). They constitute a privileged viewpoint to investigate how and at which degree journalists manage to present their claims as objective since they work as argumentative indicators (Van Eemeren et al. 2007), pointing to inherently subjective (e.g. I find that x) or possibly objective (e.g. It must be that x) standpoints and to basic (e.g. see) or assailable (e.g. apparently) premises (Rocci 2013, Musi 2014) depending on their lexical semantics. On these grounds, I will retrieve all the attested evidentials and annotate them at different levels including the types of standpoints and the type of premises they introduce (Freeman 2000, 2005). Once finished the annotation, I will compare the results of the analysis at different levels and I will try to undertstand which features make evidentials privileged strategies of subjectification or objectification.
References
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