The use of modal verbs as interpersonal cues in Arabella Philippa Maule’s book (1800-1828), with a transcription of Wellcome MS 3499

Abstract

his dissertation is situated within a growing body of research exploring women’s specialised writing and the linguistic strategies they employed to construct authority, epistemic stance, and reader engagement. Scholars such as Alonso-Almeida (2025a) have demonstrated that modality and modulation play a crucial role in shaping gendered authorial positioning, particularly in institutional and medical recipes. Similarly, Alonso- Almeida (2023) has shown how stance matrices and that-clause constructions function as interpersonal devices in instructive prose written by women, reinforcing the communicative alignment between compiler and reader. The present study also draws on work by Crespo and Moskowich (2021), who highlight how women’s involvement in scientific writing during the nineteenth century reflects both adaptation to genre conventions and the negotiation of legitimacy within male-dominated discursive spaces. This perspective is complemented by earlier studies like Moskowich (2013), which underscore the relevance of gender-sensitive corpora such as the Coruña Corpus for mapping female epistemic voice. Moreover, the use of impoliteness and stance in women’s writing, discussed by Alonso-Almeida and Álvarez Gil (2021), provides important insight into how rhetorical strategies such as sarcasm or epistemic detachment enabled female writers to claim authority while adhering to, or subtly resisting, the social expectations of their time.