Foretellers or forecasters? An analysis of the English and Italian verbs expressing prediction in economic discourse between 1900 and 1929

Predictions are prototypical speech acts of the economic discourse. By their very nature, they express different levels of certainty and degrees of subjectivity on the part of the forecaster. Their epistemic and inferential functions can be conveyed, among other things, by modal and predictive lexical verbs. These represent the object of this investigation, which offers a contrastive interlinguistic analysis of the distribution and use of modal and predictive lexical verbs in the English and Italian economic discourse of the early 20th century, based on the data extracted from a subcorpus of the multilingual comparable corpus LexEcon. The analysis highlighted how modal instances are connected to varying epistemic and inferential functions and suggested a terminologisation of predicative verbs, which appears more domain- than language-dependent.