The Verbal Expression of Belief and Hearsay in English and Spanish: Evidence from Newspaper Discourse

Abstract

One of the areas of discussion within the study of evidentiality refers to how the speaker obtains knowledge, i.e. to the source of his/her information. Chafe (1986) distinguishes four ‘modes of knowing’ or different ways in which knowledge is acquired: belief, induction, hearsay and deduction. The present contribution investigates the correlation between evidentiality and the use of verbs denoting two of these forms of indirect evidence: knowledge steming from belief or opinion and knowledge having been acquired through language. This study specifically focuses on the use of verbs denoting mental cognitive and verbal processes as evidential markers in a corpus of newspaper discourse comprising press editorials and news reports in English and Spanish.