Modalidade epistêmica e evidencialidade : um exercício de análise funcionalista em textos acadêmicos e em entrevistas com pesquisadores

• Autor(a) principal: Santos, Márcia de Freitas
• Data de Publicação: 2008
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Repositório Institucional da Universidade Estadual de Maringá (RI-UEM)
• Texto Completo: http://repositorio.uem.br:8080/jspui/handle/1/4209
• topic: Textos orais e escritos; Linguística; Gênero textual; Artigo científico; Entrevista; Descrição linguística; Modalidade epistêmica; Evidencialidade; Funcionalismo; Discurso científico.; Epistemic modality; Evidentiality; Functional linguistics; Academic discourse; Oral Language; Written language.; Linguística, Letras e Artes; Letras

This research work investigates the communicative effects produced by evidentiality and epistemic modality in spoken and written language. In order to make this research possible, a corpus was constituted with 10 academic papers and 10 oral interviews with the authors of these papers. The analyses were based on Dall'Aglio-Hattnher's studies about the typology of evidentials in Brazilian Portuguese and on the conception of clause structure as a layered organization as conceived by Functional Grammar (DIK 1989, 1997; HENGEVELD 1988, 1989). Considering that different production conditions set the linguistic strategies that will be used, we tried to verify the indication of the source of the information (evidential domain) and the evaluation made by the speaker about the truth value of his utterance (modal domain). Considering the layered organization of the clause, analysis took into account epistemic modals which affect predication level and epistemic modals which affect proposition level. When the speaker qualifies a proposition epistemically, "he takes personal responsibility for the statement of the proposition, and appoints the degree of his certainty regarding the truth or endorsement of that statement" (NEVES, 2006). On the other hand, at predication level, the speaker evaluates the reality of the state of affairs designated by predication regardless his personal opinion. The analysis of the corpus showed that in academic papers the frequency of epistemic modals at predication level was higher then the frequency of epistemic modals at proposition level because of the characteristics of the discourse genre that was analysed. Academic papers must be objective and impartial. The results were different in the oral interviews. The frequency of epistemic modals at proposition level was higher, confirming the hypothesis discussing and evaluating discoveries that have already been published promote a higher degree of commitment of the speaker. The analysis of the corpus also showed that cited evidentiality was the most used type of evidentiality in academic papers because authors usually search for the authority of respected sources. On the other hand, in the interviews, inferred evidentiality was more frequent. It was concluded that due to the fact that the speaker be the source of information, when it had no certainty about the validity of his statements or did not have sufficient data for a categorical statement, marked the doubt as his.