Marking the sources of knowledge, asserting the epistemic stance

Abstract

Abstract At the beginning of the 20th century, the Jesuit priest Joseph Deharveng (1867–1929) was one of the main representatives of a language correction movement based essentially on the standard Parisian model of French. Deharveng’s goal was to clear the practices of French-speaking Belgians of everything which seemed to deviate from this supposed ‘good usage’ of French. Under the evocative title Corrigeons-nous!, Deharveng published six anthologies from 1922 to 1928 reproducing the articles published in his language column “Récréation philologique et grammaticale” in the Brussels newspaper La Jeunesse. The present study addresses how Deharveng makes use of evidential markers, that is, linguistic features to express the sources of knowledge in his language column. The distribution of evidential markers in Deharveng’s column is compared to those in two other Franco-Belgian language columns published by Albert Doppagne (1912–2003) from 1960 to 1987 in the Brussels newspaper Le Soir and by Michel Francard (1952–) from 2018 to 2022, also in Le Soir. The aim of this comparison is to discern author-specific and language ideology-driven similarities and differences in the patterning of evidential strategies in language columns.