The value of "may" as an evidential and epistemic marker in English medical abstracts
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Date
2010
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Adam Mickiewicz University
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Abstract
Our 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.
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Part of the Research Project Evidencialidad en un corpus multidisciplinar de artículos científico-técnicos en lengua inglesa, grant FFI2009-10801 (FEDER, Spanish Ministry for Science and Innovation).
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Citation
Studia Anglica Posnaniensia, vol. 46.3 (2010), pp. 59-73