Dynamic modality and (im)politeness in nineteenth-century recipes written by women

Abstract

In this study, we are interested in assessing the feasibility of dynamic modals for expressing (im)politeness in a corpus of instructive texts written by women in the English language in the 19th century. By means of certain modal uses, levels of (inter)subjectivity of the speaker with respect to the proposition formulated are signalled. The function they serve may, for example, relate to estimations regarding the truth of certain facts or to assertions about facts. In this context, modal uses would be a matter of mitigating or explicitly assuring the proposition, which, pragmatically, can be interpreted as intentional manifestations of linguistic politeness (Brown & Levinson, 1987; Leech, 2014). This also includes dynamic modals which reflect senses of willingness and ability on the part of the speaker or writer, among other aspects, as suggested by Palmer (2001: 10). However, the semantic value of potential possibility encoded in these modal forms may indicate that they do not have a modulating effect on the proposition framed, so that they may be dispensable in certain speech events (Alonso-Almeida, 2021). Our intention, however, is to show that these dynamic forms may enable the unfolding of specific pragmatic functions, such as the expression of (im)politeness, regardless of whether they encode nuances of obligation or likelihood that may require actualization. Based on data excerpted from the Corpus of Women’s Instructive Writing in English, 1800-1899 (COWITE19) (Alonso-Almeida et al., 2023), we want to show that dynamic modality is one resource being used as a relational marker to write technical text in the period. Our method includes corpus linguistics, if manual inspection is also needed to disambiguate the meaning and functions of dynamic modals in context. We expect to show that women’s technical writing certainly expresses politeness through these forms, and we would also like to see whether such use can reveal gender differences in discourse.