Marking Epistemic Responsibility in English Media Discourse

Abstract

The paper is devoted to an analysis of English media discourse in terms of marking epistemic responsibility (ER). The study suggests 10 types of syntactic and lexical means used to mark a speaker’s responsibility for the proposition reliability. They are classified according to: (i) ER domain: high, low, disclaiming ER; (ii) level of the language system: syntactic or lexical; and (iii) lexico-grammatical features. The high ER domain is represented by two marker types: main clause and adverbials; low ER is marked by means of three types of markers: main clause, adverbials and modal verbs; disclaiming ER markers are most numerous, comprising five types of syntactic and lexical means, such as main clause, direct speech, adverbials, verbs and nouns. Thus, there tends to be a higher incidence of marking low ER or disclaiming it in English media discourse, whereas high ER is marked less often.

Keywords:

• English
• Epistemic Modality
• Epistemic Responsibility
• Evidentiality
• Media Discourse

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Although the term commitment (inter alia, epistemic commitment) tends to predominate in linguistic studies, in this paper we prefer epistemic responsibility following the philosophical tradition.

2 Here we follow the terminology developed in Bybee et al. (1994), where three types of epistemic meaning are distinguished, viz., possibility, probability and inferred certainty.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Alena Chepurnaya

Alena Chepurnaya is an Associate Professor at Stavropol State Agrarian University, Russia. Her research interests include discourse studies, media studies and crisis communication. She has (co-)authored about 40 scientific publications and is an editorial board member of International Journal of Crisis Communication. Email: [email protected]