Investigation about constructions with probably used in journalistic genre of opinion in the Mendoza press today: a cognitive-functional approach
Abstract
From a functional-semantic approach it can be distinguished between adverbs that modify the verbal core of the sentence, and those one which have not nuclear functions but they do affect an entire sentence or proposition, or even operate on a smaller segment, word or construction, but always from a peripheral position (Kovacci 1986, 1992, 1999; Wotjak 1996). This work focuses on an adverb which belongs to this class of adverbs, particularly, the modal adverbs group. It is taken a holistic approach that combines the contributions of several studies about semantics and expression of epistemic modality and evidentiality (Rodriguez Espiñeira 2010, Squartini 2001), peripheral adverbs (Kovacci 1986, 1999), modal and evidential adverbs, specifically (Müller 2007), and metadiscourse (Hyland 2005). This study inquires different uses of the adverb probably in newspaper’s opinion articles with the intention of analyze the conceptualizations that they express and their metadiscoursive functions. The main idea of this paper is that use and selection of constructions with the peripheral adverb probably corresponds to different types of conceptualizations that highlight specific metadiscoursive and discoursive functions. The corpus is composed of forty-four (44) texts, opinion articles and editorial note that were published in three newspapers of Mendoza (Argentina) in the year 2011. In the first part of this paper it is presented a concise characterization of peripheral adverbs, focusing on probably. The second part is an investigation of epistemic and evidential aspects of the same adverb, and finally, the third part is an attempt to establish the discursive and metadiscursive functions of probably related to different conceptualizations and link those one to the prototypical function of the adverb in this kind of discourse: to relativize the degree of certainty of the dictum which, although it is high, does not reach the absolute certainty.Downloads
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