Browsing by Author "Alonso-Almeida, Francisco"
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Item Stance marking and register in Middle English charms(Adam Mickiewicz University, 2009) Alonso-Almeida, FranciscoThis paper explores the expression of stance in a corpus of Middle English charms of the fifteenth century. All the charms have a healing function, and they are used whenever standard herbal remedies are ineffective. The sources from where the texts have been taken are various, all of them from edited printed material. The study of language use and the expression of personal attitude and evaluation have been studied earlier, both synchronically (Chafe 1986; Hunston 1994) and diachronically (Kytö 1991; Salager-Meyer – Defyves 1998). However, to my knowledge, the medieval English charm has not been the object of any previous account. This study of stance in charms has implications for language register, and shows both the relationship of the authors and their texts, and the authors and their audience.Item The value of "may" as an evidential and epistemic marker in English medical abstracts(Adam Mickiewicz University, 2010) Alonso-Almeida, Francisco; Cruz-García, LauraOur article addresses the issue of the relationship between epistemic modality and evidentiality. Earlier works such as Lazard (2001) claim that English does not hold grammatical markers for the source of knowledge in contrast to other languages, e.g. Quechua, that seem to do so. Dendale and Tasmowski (2001), however, think that grammatical evidentials are possible in English, and Aikhenvald (2004) admits that modal verbs in English are a borderline case. In our article, we seek to explore the use of may and might in a corpus of medical abstracts to demonstrate (i) their value as grammatical evidential markers, and (ii) their value as epistemic markers that show the author’s attitude to the proposition manifested. In doing so, we follow Cornillie (2009), who defines these two concepts as independent categories. The results of our analyses indicate that these modals may be used as grammatical markers of evidentiality, regardless of other semantic and pragmatic meanings.