The occurrence of epistemic, evaluative and delimiting modalizers in the discourse genre ‘contract’

indices of argumentativity

Abstract

This article aims to analyze and describe the semantic-argumentative operation of epistemic, evaluative and delimiting modalizers in the discourse genre contract. The adopted theoretical framework is based on the studies on Discourse Modalization, presented by Castilho & Castilho (2002), Koch (2009), Nascimento & Silva (2012), among others, and on the Discourse Genre Theory proposed by Bakhtin (2000 [1979]). The corpus is comprised of 10 (ten) contracts, collected in institutions and on the Internet. This investigation is quali-quantitative, descriptive and interpretative in nature. The results of the investigation reveal that argumentativeness is present in the discourse genre contract. Among other strategies, it uses epistemic, evaluative and delimiting modalizers. The latter are more prominent, due to the number of occurrences and the effects of meaning they produce in the genre.