Evidential markers in French scientific writing: The case of the French verb voir.

International audienceThe present paper describes a study of the evidential functions of the French verb voir/to see in the scientific genre, based on a corpus compiled from writings in the fields of linguistics and economics. Our objective was to answer two questions: (a) What are the main functions of this marker in this genre and how are these functions made manifest (meaning and use of voir)? (b) Do different fields have specific ways of using evidential markers? A brief presentation of the evidential functions of the lexicon of perception is followed by a review of the literature on the evidential meaning of voir. In order to explore this linguistic phenomenon, we compiled a large corpus of scientific writings and annotated the occurrences of voir. This approach enabled us to address the linguistic properties of voir as a statement marker and to analyze its other evidential function, that of a reference marker. We also compared the evidential functions of voir in linguistics and economics writings using a corpus drawn from these two fields