Concealed responsibility and implicit meaning: nonpersonal epistemic stance presupposition triggers in UK Conservative parliamentary and newspaper opinion migration discourse

• Autores: Elena Domínguez Romero, Marta Carretero, Mercedes González Vázquez
• Localización: Register and discourse through the lens of corpus linguistics / Nuria Yáñez Bouza (ed. lit.), Dolores González Álvarez (ed. lit.), Esperanza Rama Martínez (ed. lit.), 2026, ISBN 9789027233981, págs. 209-240
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • This chapter investigates the ways in which epistemic stance expressions (e.g., perhaps, probably, I believe, it is known, etc.) function in two registers of persuasive discourse: parliamentary debate and opinion journalism. It focuses on expressions that operate on two levels of implicitness — by concealing the epistemic source (speaker or writer) and by encoding the proposition within their scope as a presupposition. Drawing on two 60,000-word corpora — UK Conservative parliamentary debates (ANSARD) and The Telegraph opinion articles — which cover three major refugee crises and irregular immigration scenarios (2015, 2021, 2022–2023), the analysis identifies key differences in the distribution and discourse function of these expressions. Findings show that nonpersonal presupposition-triggering epistemic stance expressions are significantly more frequent in The Telegraph and in refugee discourse, where they legitimize selective support — especially for Ukrainian refugees — by constructing moral hierarchies and pre-empting dissent.