ESA SERÁ TU OPINIÓN. APROXIMACIÓN AL ESTUDIO DE LAS FUNCIONES DISCURSIVAS Y SOCIALES DE LOS MODALIZADORES DE OPINIÓN EN ESPAÑOL ACTUAL.

There exist many sources in a language to express modality, to be more specific. Among them, a particularly relevant group is that of those linguistic items, heterogeneous from a categorical point of view, which are functionally characterised because they can be found at external levels of the sentence structure and which are labelled as modal particles. The type of modal paraticles I discuss in this article includes units such as en mi opinion, a mi entender o a mi juicio. Many authors state that those expressions of modal meaning just turn the speaker into a source of message content. Thus, it seems that the content with which this particles provides the utterance is half-assertive and half-modalised. This article follows a previous one which attempted, on the one hand, to locate these particles in the complex space of the modus and, on the other hand, to explain their formal behaviour. In the current article, I explain some of the pragma-discursive strategies with which these particles are employed and which derive from the modal meaning they provide. I analyze their use as argumentative and verbal politeness strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]