Could Have, Should Have, Would Have. The Speaker’s Attitude in Expressing Hypothetical Past Alternatives in English and Italian by Means of Pragmatic Markers and Modality in EU Parliamentary Debates
Could Have, Should Have, Would Have. The Speaker’s Attitude in Expressing Hypothetical Past Alternatives in English and Italian by Means of Pragmatic Markers and Modality in EU Parliamentary Debates

Summary/Abstract: This is a corpus-based study of the debates held in the European Parliament. The focus is on deter¬mining what kind of attitude governs parliamentary debates when reference is made to past issues that could have, would have, should have or might have been handled differently. Pragmatic markers and modality are key elements in the expression of the speaker’s attitude, therefore the whole study revolves around the co-occurrence, within a set context horizon, of past conditionals and pragmat¬ic markers. Modality is necessarily involved in both the expression of the speaker’s attitude and in the formation of past conditionals, and can therefore be considered a trait d’union between the dis¬course-oriented pragmatic markers and the syntax-based conditionals. After an outline of the theoretical framework in which the present research belongs, a few hints are given as to the nature of the texts analysed, and consequently of the institution producing them. Fol¬lowing these introductory sections, an explanation is provided of the aims of the present research and of the methodology applied. Finally, results are analysed in detail in section 6 and the main points are summed up in the conclusions

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