Deconstructing economists’ arguments in the twentieth century: A diachronic cross-linguistic study of economic claims through epistemic and attitudinal stance devices in the LexEcon corpus

This chapter investigates economic discourse and argumentation across a corpus of English and Italian theoretical treatises, textbooks, and handbooks published between 1900 and 1990. We examine how epistemic and attitudinal stance markers are used to construct economic claims. By triangulating data with previous research, the analysis identifies claim-expositive lexis and concurrent markers, comparing claim presentation in theoretical treatises with that found in educational textbooks. Utilising Wmatrix 7 software, we also explore key semantic domains. Results reveal consistent patterns in conveying epistemic and attitudinal stance through adverbs and complement clauses in English and Italian. Money and related subjects are identified as common semantic domains across both languages. The overarching aim is to provide a diachronic view of the evolution of argumentation in economics.