Semantic aspects of evidentiality in opinion articles from the newspaper “Diário do Nordeste” in the State of Ceará

This This research aimed to analyze the semantic aspects of evidentiality in opinion articles from the newspaper “Diário do Nordeste” in the State of Ceará, from June 1st to July 31st, 2022. The linguistic theory adopted in this work is functionalism, more specifically, through the functionalist perspective of Hengeveld and Mackenzie (2008) in relation to their Discursive-Functional Grammar (GDF), as the GDF, based on the top-down theoretical model, begins with the speaker's communicative intention and goes to the articulation, making the GDF represent a theoretical-descriptive positioning for the analysis of linguistic expression. The corpus of this research corresponds to 30 opinion articles from the newspaper “Diário do Nordeste” in the State of Ceará. Methodologically, the semantic aspects of evidentiality in opinion articles were analyzed. In the results of this work, in relation to semantic aspects, a higher percentage of the defined external source was observed with 47.59%, followed by the subject-speaker source with 43.45%; a predominance of the percentage of indirect evidential access was observed with 55.17%, followed by direct evidential access with 42.76% and a predominance of the reported evidential nature was observed with 55.17%.

Keywords:
evidentiality ; functional discourse grammar ; opinion article ; newspaper “diário do nordeste”