A hidden or unobserved presence? Impersonal evaluative structures in English and Italian and their wake

This paper explores the observation made by Biber and Finegan that “stance in English seems to be often integrated into a text rather than overtly marked” (1989:118) in a corpus of opinion articles from quality newspapers in English and Italian that all deal with the topic of the 1999 Kosovo crisis. Using quantitative methods and close text analysis, the paper concentrates on impersonal expressions of evaluation in English and Italian, such as it is + adj è that / è + adj + che, and shows how, particularly through the use of adverbs, the writer’s voice can nevertheless be discerned in what appears to be an impersonal expression