Discourse markers of uncertainty in ted talks: a corpus analysis

Abstract

The paper presents a corpus analysis of the use of discursive markers of uncertainty with the original semantics of visual perception in a corpus of TED Talks in English and their translations into Russian. Uncertainty is understood as the speaker’s incomplete confidence that the information being reported corresponds to some state of affairs in the real world. Accordingly, markers of uncertainty are those language units with which the speaker indicates incomplete confidence in the correspondence of what is said to the real situation. A parallel corpus of transcribed texts with a total number of 766,285 tokens was used as a source of data. The aim of the research is to describe the functions of markers of uncertainty and analyze the ways of translating these markers into Russian. The paper uses corpus methods that allow for estimating the frequency of use of various discursive markers of uncertainty and to see how these markers are translated into Russian. The study shows that in TED Talks in general, discursive markers of uncertainty are infrequent. There may be several explanations for this: first, the very genre of the TED Talks lecture is a talk about the results of scientific research, which by default should be reliable. Secondly, in English, the meaning of uncertainty is often expressed by modal verbs – this fact is supported by the frequency of use of modal verbs and discursive markers of problem confidence. As for the translations of discursive markers into Russian, the data of the parallel corpus show that here, as in the translations of texts of other genres, there is a significant variety in the choice of translated equivalents.