Epistemic modality in English and Thai medical abstracts: a corpus-based study

Abstract

ABSTRACT Epistemicity is roughly understood as the linguistic expression of a speaker’s commitment to what they say or write. Against a backdrop of scant knowledge about how the phenomenon works in many non-European languages, this study seeks to explore epistemicity in translated and original Thai. Two specialized corpora were built. The first, a parallel corpus of medical abstracts translated from English into Thai (about 100,000 English and 150,000 Thai words), was used to investigate translated Thai and its relationship with the English source texts. The second, a 250,000-word monolingual corpus of medical abstracts originally written in Thai, was used to compare translated and non-translated texts. The distribution and strength of epistemic modal expressions in translated Thai abstracts were found to follow closely patterns established in the English source texts. They differed significantly from patterns observed in original Thai, however, leading to the tentative conclusion that translated Thai could impart less certainty on the writers’ side than would normally be perceived by readers of medical abstracts originally written in Thai.