universidade federal de santa catarina pós-graduação em letras ...

1184.2.3.2 Validity markers, attitude markers, and text connectivesThe idea of discourse markers has been used for classifying and recognizingwriters’ attitude towards the information conveyed in academic texts (Adams-Smith1984; Barton 1993) and can be used in the identification of evaluative passages.Vande Kopple (1985) argues that any text can be seen as having (at least) twodifferent levels: informative and metadiscursive. On the first level, information isconveyed about the facts of the world so that the locutionary force of language is inaction (i.e., ‘the act of saying something’ as a statement (Austin,[1962]1975:94)).Working within this level, we explore the propositional content of the message. On thesecond level, we access the ‘metadiscourse’ level, the language that is being used in thetext to refer to the text itself, i.e., linguistic devices to guide both the writer’sargumentation and the reader’s interpreting of what is in the text (‘the performance of anact in saying something’ such as, signaling to the reader that the text is approaching itsend.)Among the seven different types of metadiscourse defined by Vande Kopple,three are specially meaningful for the definition of evaluative moves, namely, validityand attitude markers and text connectives.Validity Markers (e.g., perhaps, may, might; clearly, undoubtedly; according to X)show evaluation, signaling the writer’s appraisal of the probability or truth of thepropositional content expressed (p.84). Verbal and non-verbal modals are speciallyuseful examples of validity markers, as in ‘Here Martin (1989) and Swales (1990)