Corpus Evidence for Evidentials in English and Serbian Political Interviews

Abstract

The article presents a small-scale contrastive analysis of evidential markers carried out on a sample of political interview discourse in English and Serbian. Methodologically, the so-called independent approach in contrastive analysis is taken, as the research starts from the notion of evidentiality as a tertium comparationis and looks for its linguistic expressions in two corpora of political statements, interviews and speeches given by prominent English (speaking) and Serbian politicians over a period of three years (2014-2017). The approximate size of the corpus is 150,000 words; it consists of 20 samples for each language, the average sample length being around 3000 words.
On the theory front, the article tries to bridge the gap between the two opposing schools of thought concerning the status of evidentiality – whether it is a linguistic category in its own right (Aikhenwald 2004, Cornillie 2009, Popović 2010) or whether it can be subsumed under epistemic modality (Chafe 1986, Palmer 1986). Evidentiality in this paper is understood in its ‘broader’ sense: evidentials are taken to be linguistic markers that indicate the speaker’s type of evidence for her claim and/or degree of its reliability, probability or certainty (Diewald & Smirnova 2010: 159). Therefore, the linguistic exponents of evidentiality investigated in the paper are taken to be expressions of interactants’ epistemic stance, spanninga value-range from full commitment to full detachment. Within the framework of interactive modality, epistemic stance may be viewed as an expression of speaker/writer attitudes residing not only in individual speakers/writers, but being dynamically constructed in response to the interactional requirements of the social/situational context and aiming at either establishing or disclaiming responsibility and authority. For this reason, they may be considered ‘evidential strategies’ (Aikhenvald 2014).
The aim of the research is at least fourfold:
1. to identify, describe and classify the markers of evidentiality in the discourse of English-speaking and Serbian politicians;
2. to identify patterns in the evidential strategies used by the speakers in this particular type of discourse;
3. to compare the relative frequencies of occurrence of the evidential markers and the strategies behind them in order to draw inferences of (intercultural) pragmatic nature;
4. to establish contrasts and similarities in the patterning of evidential strategies used in constructing social meaning in the discourse of politics in order to draw inferences of a typological nature.