The pragmatics of the Spanish verb resultar ‘turn out' for expressing evidentiality and new knowledge in academic texts

In this study, we examine the uses of the Spanish verb resultar «to turn out' in the light of two approaches: the traditional evidential approach and the more recent emergence-of-new-knowledge approach. According to the evidential approach, resultar is an evidential marker: it conveys an inferential meaning acquired by the speaker through the process of evaluation. The emergence-of-new-knowledge approach suggests that the inferential meaning arises due to the context in which resultar is used and its core meaning is emergence of new knowledge. We firstly discuss both approaches within the broader theoretical frameworks of evidentiality and mirativity and then turn to our corpus study. We look at the uses of resultar in the syntactic pattern resultar + adjective, which is the most common pattern for resultar in written discourse but remains understudied within the emergence-of-new-knowledge approach. Our data comes from Spanish academic texts; since the process of acquiring new knowledge and the ways to describe it are central to the academic discourse, it is expected that the emergence-of-new-knowledge interpretation for resultar will obtain additional support. Annotation was carried out according to the following parameters: (i) evaluative/non-evaluative adjectives used with resultar and (ii) emergence/absence of new knowledge. The study showed that although the verb resultar appears more often with evaluative adjectives than with non-evaluative adjectives, it can still be used as an evidential strategy on its own, which provides support to the evidential approach. Furthermore, it demonstrated that the verb resultar does not always convey new knowledge in our corpus. Thus, we conclude that the evidential approach provides a better analysis of resultar in the examined syntactic pattern, while emergence-of-new-knowledge approach still requires further development possibly taking into account other mirative meanings.