<b>Evidential markers in minutes of Mercosur Parliament: a functional analysis

Abstract

 This work analyzes reporting verbs which function as evidential markers in Spanish in the minutes of Meetings of the Mercosur Parliament, proposing a hierarchy of strenghts between the verbs. The choice of the Minute genre is justified because it is a type of documentary record required in many professional contexts. The reporting verbs perform in the texts of the corpus the strategic function of making reference to the source of the information given in the Sessions. Because we consider the relevance of the study of reporting verbs in genres of the secretarial sphere, we have selected for this article data referring to 10 reporting verbs from a corpus constituted by 35 min of Meetings of the Mercosur Parliament. The research indicated the relevance of the presentation of the source of information in the genre, by bringing forward the following results: i) the genre mobilizes a greater number of declarative verbs and verbs that indicate the contents of a sphere of power, according to Sánchez García's (2009) taxonomy of verbs of; ii) there is a high frequency of evidential markers of a definite reported source, which aims to attribute greater credibility to the utterance; iv) the reporting verbs encoded with strenghts [1] and [2] stand out due to their number of occurrences.