LA MODALIDAD EPISTÉMICA EN ELE: RETOS EN LA DESCRIPCIÓN DE LA SEMÁNTICA DE VARIAS UNIDADES EN MATERIALES DIDÁCTICOS
EPISTEMIC MODALITY IN SFL: CHALLENGES IN THE DESCRIPTION OF THE SEMANTICS OF SOME UNITS IN A CORPUS OF DIDACTIC MATERIALS

Summary/Abstract: Spanish possesses a vast array of items that codify the speaker’s degree of certainty or doubt (i.e., epistemic modality), such as quizá, igual, seguramente or sin duda. Little attention has been devoted to them in the field of Spanish as a Foreign Language, especially regarding their semantics. The aim of this article is to show that some of the semantic descriptions of such items reveal inconsistencies in a variety of didactic sources, and this might hinder students from mastering them. We focus on three case studies involving (a) where certain items are allocated in the epistemic scale, (b) how a group of similar expressions is treated, and (c) how the semantics of an adverb is described vis-à-vis its cognates in other languages.

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