Soundwordsmatter: Epistemic modality and evidentiality in Twitter discourse on racism

This paper presents the results of a corpus-based pilot study aiming to investigate whether and to what extent epistemicity and evidentiality contribute to the degree of assertiveness of discourse on Twitter. The analysis was conducted on 900 tweets in English, Italian, and Spanish, published between May and June 2020 after the killing of George Floyd in the USA. We explore the epistemic constructions employed by users to evaluate the object of discourse (racism, discrimination), and their use of evidentials for marking the source of information of their statements. The results show that epistemic markers are not frequent in the corpora, but that in most cases they display high commitment towards the truth of the users’ propositions. As for evidentiality, its presence is even lower, especially in the English dataset. These findings suggest that controversial debates on Twitter favour the adoption of assertive and inferential strategies.