Epistemicidad y evidencialidad en la elección del modo en español: el caso de 'tal vez': Un estudio de la importancia de las condiciones temporales, epistémicas y evidenciales, a través de las concordancias y las solidaridades formales en textos de corpus

Abstract

The modal information expressed by a verb can be dependent or independent, depending on whether it needs to be chosen by an inducer or not. The subjunctive mood in Spanish is considered to be a dependent mood because it normally appears in the presence of a grammatical inducer. This thesis focuses on the connection between epistemicity, evidentiality and the selection of mood in statements that contain the adverbial inducer «tal vez». This adverb can select the present indicative, present subjunctive or imperfect subjunctive mood, depending on the level of certainty of the information conveyed in the statement. It is thought hat the certainty is highest when the indicative mood is used and lowest when it is accompanied by the imperfective subjunctive mood. The imperfective mood does however always have to accompany an adverb like «tal vez» if the text it appears in is in the past tense. Therefore, one of the questions that is attempted answered in this thesis is whether it is mostly the fact that a text is in the past tense or the need to express the maximum amount of doubt that influences the choice of mood. Because the choice of the mood and tense is ultimately up to the individual speaker, the thesis also includes an attempt to determine whether these rules are always followed. This is done through analyse of indicators that can tell us something about the amount of evidentiality or epistemicity in a given text, which in turn reflects the amount of certainty conveyed, or that was intended to be conveyed, by the speaker or writer. The texts themselves are taken from a corpus of the Spanish language (i.e. El corpus del Español de Davies). The thesis also contains a section about didactics, as it is written as part of an integrated pedagogical program. The didactic proposal focuses mainly on an observation of a high school class in which the pupils were taught about the subjunctive mood and is meant to show some of the obstacles a teacher could meet in this situation.