Evidentiality and textual modality in scientific/technical discourse: educational implications

Evidentiality and textual modality are two widely debated field parameters within discourse analysis. The attitude of the author towards the topic indicates its commitment to the established proposition. In this way, his attitude can have either an emotional/expressive character (subjective tonality) or a rational/ evaluative character (objective tonality), always taking into account the relativity of both terms. The present paper focuses on the analysis of evidentiality and epistemic modality within scientific and technical discourse from the perspective of linguistics and textual stylistics. In our proposal, objective modality is equivalent to the evidential epistemic or assertive modality, while subjective modality is equivalent to non-assertive epistemic modality. This proposal is illustrated with examples of lexical and verbal markers which reveal the polifunctionality of the text intensifiers or boosters. The corpus used corresponds to the database of the research group TELL (Tecnologias Emergentes aplicadas a la Lengua y a la Literatura), belonging to IDeTIC (Instituto para el Desarrollo Tecnologico y la Innovacion en Comunicaciones) of the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. This paper forms part of the research project "Evidentiality in a multidisciplinary corpus of research paper in English" of the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. Adapted from the source document