In:Multilingual Corpus Research: Advances and challenges
Edited by Noelia Ramón and María Pérez Blanco
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 126] 2026
► pp. 230–254
Chapter 9Foretellers or forecasters?
An analysis of the English and Italian verbs expressing prediction in economic discourse between 1900 and 1929
Published online: 20 February 2026
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.126.09qui
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.126.09qui
Abstract
Predictions are prototypical speech acts of the economic discourse. By their very nature, they express different levels of
certainty and degrees of subjectivity on the part of the forecaster. Their epistemic and inferential functions can be conveyed, among
other things, by modal and predictive lexical verbs. These represent the object of this investigation, which offers a contrastive
interlinguistic analysis of the distribution and use of modal and predictive lexical verbs in the English and Italian economic discourse
of the early 20th century, based on the data extracted from a subcorpus of the multilingual comparable corpus LexEcon. The analysis
highlighted how modal instances are connected to varying epistemic and inferential functions and suggested a terminologisation of
predicative verbs, which appears more domain- than language-dependent.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction: The controversial art and science of prediction
- 2.Previous research on the language of forecasting
- 2.1The language of forecasting in economic discourse
- 2.2Modal and lexical verbs in predictions: A focus on English and Italian
- 3.Research objectives, data and method
- 4.Analysis and discussion
- 4.1Modal verbs in English and Italian
- 4.2Lexical verbs in English and Italian
- 5.Conclusions
Notes References
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