The work focuses on the analysis of English and Italian verbs reporting statements and assertions in argumentation, whose repertoires are asymmetric and the correlated matching in translation often appears to be inappropriate or misleading (cf. assert, affirm, maintain, contend, claim, argue, state, declare, allege vs. affermare, sostenere, dichiarare, asserire, argomentare). Most of them presuppose a polemic component or controversial situation of use, viz. some kind opposition more or less overtly expressed in context (cf. object, insist, vs. claim, maintain). A congruent mapping is in fact important because, besides reporting information, these verbs are a means for interpreting and conveying evaluation (in more direct or indirect ways) of past communicative events and of their protagonists (notably the original or reported speaker) by the text producer/reporter, with consequences for the receiver in terms of the degree to which s/he is supposed (i.e. led by the text) to believe that what is reported is valid. The goals of the work are then to explore the mechanism behind the interaction between lexico-semantic and pragmatic dimensions presupposed by these verbs and to use this interplay of dimensions as a benchmark (tertium comparationis) for a more precise cross-linguistic mapping. From a theoretical point of view, reference is made to Sbisà’s (1989) pragmatic framework. Relevant data where gathered from an aligned English - Italian corpus (based on Brown corpus), samples from books on politics (original English texts – Italian translations and vice versa), other general corpora (where verb-adverb combinations where especially focused on), dictionaries and informants.