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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. 202–229

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Chapter 8
How economists modify their claims

A cross-linguistic study of epistemic and attitudinal stance in the diachronic LexEcon corpus

 | University of Trieste
Published online: 20 February 2026
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https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.126.08mus
Abstract
This study examines how writers express epistemic and attitudinal stance in English and Italian economic texts from 1900 to 1929. It analyses a corpus of treatises and textbooks to identify stance markers and their role in argumentation. Using quantitative and qualitative methods, the frequency and use of these markers in the two languages and general language corpora are compared. The findings show that economic claims are expressed in similar ways but with differences in marker frequency. Italian writers tend to explain, evaluate, and quantify, while English writers favour cause-and-effect reasoning. The qualitative analysis highlights how stance markers shape different arguments, influencing how economic discourse is structured in each language.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Previous studies on argumentation
  • 3.Research objectives
  • 4.Research design, methods and materials
    • 4.1Corpus and data sources
    • 4.2Analytical approach
  • 5.Analysis and results
    • 5.1Epistemic and attitudinal stance markers in English and Italian
    • 5.2Semantic domains of stance markers in English and Italian
    • 5.3Cross-linguistic comparison of argumentation
  • 6.Discussion
  • 7.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
References (32)
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