| Abstract [eng] |
The aim of the present study called ‘Epistemicity in Covid-19 discourse in the British and American Press’ is to explore epistemicity markers in the context of Covid-19 discourse across different genres (i.e. opinion columns, editorials and news reports) in the British and American broadsheets, namely The Times, The Independent, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. The study focussed on the expressions of epistemic support, epistemic justification, cognitive attitude and factivity. The main objectives of this study are to identify and examine the epistemicity markers in the corpora compiled, to compare the expressions of epistemicity occurring in the opinion columns, editorials and news reports, and to reveal the impact of supported ideology on the representation of Covid-19. The data was collected from the British and American newspapers mentioned above. The results indicate that irrespective of the ideological distinction of the newspapers, some expressions are used by journalists for either positioning their voice explicitly or distancing themselves from the responsibility of the claim. The remarkable point is that both British and American newspapers promoting a liberal view tend to use more epistemicity markers compared to the newspapers holding conservative ideology. It might suggest that the writers of former newspapers prefer interacting with readers explicitly. |
