From a pragmatic point of view, opinion modifiers staff (mop; in my opinion, in my view) have been mostly characterized as attenuators. However, the analysis of their semantics makes it clear that one might rethink whether the mitigating function is really the most salient one: although they restrict the validity of the propositional content under their scope to a strictly subjective sphere that need not coincide with reality, they encode, at the same time, the full conviction of the speaker. While the first semantic component would be more correlated with attenuation, it could be understood that the second would turn mop into productive intensifying strategies. The goal of this article is to reconsider the importance of the mitigating function in explaining the pragmatic behavior of these expressions and to identify other functions they frequently perform. The present study is based on a qualitative analysis of a sample of parliamentary debates containing the mop in my opinion. The results obtained show that, in addition to attenuating, this linguistic unit is also used to reinforce one's own point of view, to increase the effectiveness of an attack on the heteroimage, to highlight the original contribution of the sender and to focus a positive or negative assessment . Moreover, several of these functions tend to converge in the same occurrence.

Encapsulators are cohesive nominal syntagms that condense a discursive segment of a predicative nature. Their persuasive potential has been extensively studied at bibliography. Some works have identified general trends regarding the thematic or rhematic position of these noun phorics. However, the influence of certain parameters on the preference for one or the other position based on quantitative data has not been accounted for. The goal of this article is to analyze in a corpus of newspaper editorials the significance of these parameters, most of them related to the evaluative and persuasive potential of these nominal syntagms, in order to explain the employment of the encapsulators in the thematic-rhematic progression. In our corpus, rhematic encapsulators are slightly more frequent, but in the article we show that there are no clear correlations between parameters and percentages. Although the assessment seems to occupy a relevant role (the most evaluative encapsulators tend to appear in rhematic positions), we try to show that this parameter is mediated by many others that turn encapsulators into referential expressions with a much less predictable behavior. We also reflect on the relevance of other parameters of a cognitive (accessibility of the referent) and textual (discursive genre) nature.

The semantics and pragmatics of modalizers of opinion (MOPs), such as "in my opinion", have been the subject of heterogeneous definitions, especially because they have been situated in different places in the conceptual spaces of two linguistic categories: evidentiality and epistemic modality . This article attempts to clarify to what extent the semantics of MOPs is related to these categories. Although the epistemological process behind an opinion staff bears some resemblance to those encoded by the markers of inferential evidentiality and epistemic modality , it does not coincide with them. Thus, it is argued that MOPs have neither an evidential nor an epistemic modal meaning, but encode another notion that has gone unnoticed: conviction. This proposal is based on an original model that tries to systematically distinguish the semantics of the markers of inferential evidentiality, of modality epistemic and of MOPs.

This chapter defines and characterizes the object and objectives of the discipline in charge of the rules and procedures available to languages for the construction of texts: text grammar. In order to locate the place of both the discipline and the role of these procedures in the construction and interpretation of discourses, the starting point is the levels of speaking in Eugenio Coseriu's theory of integral linguistics, through which it is possible to distinguish what in the text is due to the cognitive level, to the language as such, and what implies the enrichment of content given by the contextual determination. On the basis of this theory, from the selection of a set of phenomena related to phorical deixis, the functionality of the levels of speaking and also the imbrications between them have been shown. Finally, examples are given to show sample that the description of the textual grammar of a language must be carried out both in the field of the possibilities offered by the system and in its normal realizations (of the rule in the Coserian sense).