Speaker’s stance and subjectivity in the epistemic modal and evidential use of the Spanish imperfecto in journalistic texts

Abstract

Abstract This study contributes to the analysis of the epistemic modal and evidential use of the Spanish imperfecto with regard to the speaker’s stance and subjectively (rather than grammatically) motivated decision to use the Spanish imperfecto as an evidential strategy in journalistic texts: The speaker uses the Spanish imperfecto to express or tell a state of affairs from his perspective as a ‘narrator’, implying that he is not the author of such information and referring to third sources without mentioning it. The corpus data were obtained from the Corpus de la Real Academia Española (CREA) from the section ‘written journalistic texts’ of the standard Iberian Spanish to guarantee the authenticity of examples and avoid any case of misunderstanding it as a variety of Spanish.