Stance matrices licensing that-clauses and interpersonal meaning in nineteenth-century women’s instructive writing in English

Abstract

This paper examines stance matrices licensing that-clauses in a corpus of instructional texts authored by women during the nineteenth century, gathered under the label COWITE19. These matrices can reveal various aspects of the authors' assessment, involvement and understanding of the information they present. In other words, their use discloses the authors' evaluation of their text while conveying a wide range of interpersonal meanings without disregarding their organising potential as textual markers. The types of matrices explored in this article precede the that-clauses and generally contain information denoting authorial perspective and involvement. The data used to demonstrate their forms and functions derive from analysing all cases found in the Corpus of Women's Instructive Texts in English (1550–1900) (COWITE); for the current study, only the nineteenth-century sub-corpus, henceforth COWITE19, has been considered. This corpus exclusively comprises instructional texts penned by women during the nineteenth century. The findings reveal that although the corpus primarily encompasses recipes from a diverse range of registers, the authoritative voice of women is distinctly evident in the matrices analysed, conveying a series of interpersonal meanings that unequivocally highlight the experience of women writers and their adept command of the content and techniques being discussed.