As manifestações epistêmicas e evidenciais como marcas de (des)comprometimento em artigos científicos

Abstract

This study aims at analyzing evidentiality and epistemic modality and their relationship with the level of engagement of a scientific article writer and the stated content. To the description and analysis of the data it is used the functional perspective on language, in which the language is not understood as an independent object, but as a system under the pressure of communicative situations. Thus, this investigation focuses on the expressions in use, trying to understand the functioning of the language, since it is through the use that the expressions acquire meaning. In order to make this research possible the corpus used is constituted by 9 scientific articles taken from Linguistics annals published within the years of 2008 and 2009. We have chosen the analysis of evidentiality and epistemic modality as functional domains which mark the level of engagement of a scientific article writer since we have as a presupposition that in such case, we may find several registers of these categories used as detachment strategies, considering that the author of this type of writing leads towards objectiveness as stipulated by manuals of scientific methodology, getting detached from the content to preserve the work scientific style. 410 occurrences have been collected and analyzed concerning synthetic (means of expressions and position of evidential marks in the statement), semantic (type of domain and source of the evidential manifestation), and pragmatic (level of commitment of a scientific article writer with the stated content, and the presence of explicit marks of adhesion) aspects. The results proved that evidentiality and epistemic modality are used in scientific texts to promote an effect of medium engagement, revealing that the scientific discourse is marked by the use of expressions that mask the author’s subjectivity and highlight their partial engagement with the established truth. Concerning the means of expressions used, we observed that scientific article writers prefer the use of evidential and epistemic modal manifestations expressed through verbal items. Regarding the analyzed genre, it has been found more occurrences related to the reported evidentiality from a definite source, with interspersed marks between the source of information and the established content.