Epistemic modality in academic talks

CIAPUSCIO, GUIOMAR ELENA

Working with Spanish Corpora

Continuum

Lugar: Londres; Año: 2006;

Research on specialized discourse in different languages has focused on written genres. Only recently, there has been a more sustained interest in the linguistic and grammatical particularities of academic oral genres  (e.g., for English see Hunston, 1998; Recski, 2005; Ventola, Shalom & Thompson, 2002; for Spanish, Castellà Lidon, 2004; Ciapuscio, 2003a; 2004; Ciapuscio & Kesselheim, 2005; Fortanet; 2005 Müller, 2005, among others).  Thus, this article seeks to broaden and deepen the knowledge of epistemic modality and its lexical/grammatical markers in a genre of academic orality in Spanish: the popular science talk. This knowledge will become an input for further extensive research on specialized Spanish, as a part of the COTECA project (“Argentina’s Scientific Spanish Text Corpus: Generic, Lexical/Grammatical, and Terminological Research”). COTECA seeks to contribute to the knowledge of oral and written Spanish used by Argentine academic researchers and specialists.