On the expression of epistemic intra-clausal verbal present high probability in Spanish and English

Abstract

The complexity of the linguistic expression of epistemic modality, in which syntactic, semantic and pragmatic factors interact, suggests that it may prove an interesting area for contrastive analysis. The present study concerns the realizations that Spanish and English have for one part of this modality, namely epistemic high probability realized intraclausally within the verbal group and referring to present time. With the aid of two corpora of face-to-face conversation, one Spanish and the other English, the choice of one epistemic realization or another will be proved to be dependent on a number of heterogeneous factors, such as precision, politeness strategies and the avoidance of awkward collocations. The conflation of all these factors results in a distribution of the epistemic area here studied peculiar to each language, which accounts for apparent irregularities in the translation of the realizations from Spanish to English and vice versa. In particular, the adequate translation of 'Futuro Indicativo' (cantare) in Spanish and must in English displays important differences depending on the context in which they occur.