An analysis of certainly and generally in Late-Modern English English history texts

This paper analyses the adverbs and as stancetaking markers. These adverbial devices are said to show authorial stance and to communicate the author’s commitment or detachment towards the information presented, and so they are classified as epistemic adverbs (Alonso-Almeida 2015). For this study, I...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inResearch in language Vol. 17; no. 2; pp. 179 - 195
Main Author Álvarez-Gil, Francisco J.
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Lodz Sciendo 01.06.2019
De Gruyter Poland
Subjects
adverb
Adverbials
Adverbs
Computer generated language analysis
Computerized corpora
corpus linguistics
English language
epistemic modality
Evidentiality
Hedges
Historical text analysis
Language history
Pragmatics
stance
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Summary:This paper analyses the adverbs and as stancetaking markers. These adverbial devices are said to show authorial stance and to communicate the author’s commitment or detachment towards the information presented, and so they are classified as epistemic adverbs (Alonso-Almeida 2015). For this study, I have selected a corpus of history texts from the Modern English period (1700-1900), as compiled in (Crespo and Moskowich 2015), on the basis of which the two evidential adverbs are examined using computer corpus tools, although manual inspection is also employed to assess the meaning of the items in context. The findings suggest that, in this type of scientific articles, the two adverbs are used with differing pragmatic functions, in the case of it functions mostly as a booster and, in the specific case of , its use seems to primarily suggest a hedging purpose (Hyland 2005a).
ISSN:2083-4616
1731-7533
2083-4616
DOI:10.2478/rela-2019-0011