Epistemic Words on the Confidence Scale
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Date
Authors
Бялик, Василь Дмитрович
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ACADEMIC JOURNAL OF MODERN PHILOLOGY
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Abstract
The article examines a group of 107 epistemic words in order to determine their integral and differential semes and place them on the confidence scale. The relevance of the study is conditioned by the interest in studying the stance of a speaker's utterance. The article analyses the notion of epistemic words, their linguistic and non-linguistic properties. As a result of definition and semantic analyses of epistemic words, epistemic words with high, medium and low modal strength were singled out. Such a categorization is possible, because epistemic words have the same integral semes but various differential semes. Epistemic words have a scalar nature and the level of their modal strength reflects the speaker's commitment to the utterance that ranges from confidence to uncertainty.
Description
Linguistic ways of expressing personal feelings and assessments have been the focus of many studies.
Thus, the speaker’s position is conveyed through various markers of epistemic modality, among which
epistemic words occupy a prominent place. Epistemic words have been studied by many linguists
(Leo Hoye, Rodney Huddleston, George Lakoff, Frank Palmer, Geoffrey Pullum, Anna Wierzbicka),
psycholinguists (Daniel Kahneman, Karl Teigen, Amos Tversky), sociolinguists ( Janet Holmes, Robin
Lakoff) that indicates a comprehensive and synergistic approach to the study of this speech phenomenon.
Understanding the semantics of epistemic words is based on the semantic components “I think”
and “I do not say that I know” (Wierzbicka 2006: 204). Epistemic words convey the speaker’s attitude to
the proposition of the utterance. According to their place in the utterance, epistemic words are divided
into those that have a definite position and are used before its proposition (epistemic verbs, nouns and
adjectives) and those that do not have a definite place (epistemic adverbs, parentheses or phrases). Usually, epistemic words are used in the main part of the utterance before the subordinate part and are connected
with it by the conjunctions that, to or without a conjunction, and in the structure of the statement refer to
the pronoun in the first person singular or plural. Also, there is an opinion (Biber 2006: 99) that epistemic
words refer to pronouns in any person if they convey a stance to what is said. Anna Wierzbicka (2006:
204) studies epistemic verbs in phrases with the personal pronoun I.