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In:Multilingual Corpus Research: Advances and challenges
Edited by Noelia Ramón and María Pérez Blanco
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 126] 2026
► pp. 123–150

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Chapter 5
Personal and non-personal epistemic stance in Spanish and Galician political opinion articles

A corpus-based approach

 | Universidade de Vigo
Published online: 20 February 2026
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https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.126.05gon
Abstract
This paper explores variation across epistemic stance strategies in newspaper opinion articles in two Romance languages: Spanish and Galician. Drawing on Marín-Arrese’s model (2011, 2021), the study presents a quantitative and qualitative analysis of personal and non-personal realisations of five stance subcategories: cognitive attitude, factivity, inferential evidentiality, aphonic or ignorative attitude, and marked enunciational positioning. The dataset comprises two 62,000-word corpora from left-leaning newspapers covering three refugee crises. The paper aims to identify patterns of distribution, similarities, and differences across the subcorpora. The findings highlight key points: the Spanish corpus contains fewer stance markers; both languages favour non-personal forms and share the two prevalent categories — non-personal cognitives and factives. However, Galician also features non-personal inferentiality as a third prevalent category.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Literature review on stance
    • 2.1Cognitive factives
    • 2.2Cognitive attitudes
    • 2.3Indirect inferential evidentiality
    • 2.4Aphonic or ignorative attitude
    • 2.5Marked enunciational positioning
  • 3.Research hypotheses
  • 4.Data and method
  • 5.Results and discussion
    • 5.1Quantitative and qualitative analysis of stance in Spanish
    • 5.2Quantitative and qualitative analysis of stance in Galician
    • 5.3Cross-linguistic variation of epistemic stance in Spanish and Galician
  • 6.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
References (48)
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