Epistemic modality in academic talks

CIAPUSCIO, GUIOMAR ELENA

Working with spanish corpora

Continuum

Lugar: London; Año: 2007; p. 90 - 105

Research on specialized discourse in different languages has focused on written ‘genres’. Only recently has there been more sustained interest in the linguistic and grammatical peculiarities of academic oral ‘genres’  (for English see Hunston 1998; Recski 2005; Ventola, Shalom and Thompson 2002; for Spanish, Castellà Lidon 2004; Ciapuscio 2003a, 2004; Ciapuscio and Kesselheim 2005; Fortanet 2005; Müller 2005, among others).  This article seeks to broaden and deepen the knowledge of epistemic modality and its lexico-grammatical markers in a ‘genre’ of academic orality in Spanish, namely popular science talk. This knowledge will contribute to further extensive research in specialized Spanish, as a part of the COTECA project (“Argentina’s Scientific Spanish Text Corpus: Generic, Lexico-Grammatical, and Terminological Research”).2 COTECA seeks to contribute to the knowledge of the oral and written Spanish used by Argentine academic researchers.