Reportive evidentiality. A perception-based complement approach to digital discourse in Spanish and English

Ver-Based Evidential Re/Positioning Strategies in Conservative Digital Newspaper Readers’ Comments on Controversial Immigration Policies in Spanish

“…This hierarchy of subjectivity works as follows: Subjective-explicit 'I see' > Intersubjective-explicit 'We see' > Intersubjective-implicit 'It is seen' (Boye 2012;Marín-Arrese 2015Nuyts 2017). Therefore, in line with Domínguez Romero (2022), the present paper leads to the conclusion that visual perceptual experiences can acquire evidential values and express epistemological stance, offering justificatory support to the positioning and repositioning strategies that they introduce in newspaper readers' digital discourse. Also, differences in perspectives held by readers of ABC and La Razón have been observed regarding their various positions on opinion articles relating to the Aquarius and the Open Arms events.…”

“…Whitt (2010) has also contributed to this field by developing a typology of evidential perception verbs, which encompasses seven complementation patterns and two construction types. As illustrated in Domínguez Romero (2016Romero ( , 2022 Approaching this standpoint with cautiousness, as explained by Domínguez Romero and Martín de la Rosa (2017), and in agreement with typological studies that advocate for the encoding of evidentiality through grammatical markers such as verbal affixes and modal auxiliaries (Chafe and Nichols 1986;Willet 1988;De Haan 1999;Aikhenvald 2003Aikhenvald , 2004, Boye (2012) contends that perception verbs may only evolve into evidential adverbs or other types of grammatical evidential expressions when a propositional clause accompanies them as their semantic domain (Boye 2012, p. 212). Seeking an intermediary perspective, Marco (2016) and Kotwica (2015Kotwica ( , 2017 have revisited Anderson (1986), Boye (2010), Hassler (2010), andWhitt (2010) and established a set of three fundamental conditions that must be met for the Spanish ver ("see") to operate with evidential meaning: (i) it expresses a perceptual action in which the speaker participates, which commonly corresponds with the first-person verb forms, since "the perceptual evidence always lies within the speaker" (Whitt 2010, p. 256).…”