Adverbials and interpersonal meaning in earlier women’s instructive writing

Abstract

This article explores how epistemic adverbials, particularly assuredly, indeed, perhaps, possibly, probably, and surely, function interpersonally in Late Modern English instructive texts authored by women. Drawing on Hyland’s polypragmatic model of stance and hedging, the study investigates how these forms serve to modulate epistemic commitment, negotiate writer-reader alignment, and reinforce or attenuate claims. The data are drawn from the Corpus of Women’s Instructive Texts in English (CoWITE), specifically the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century subcorpora. Combining quantitative and qualitative methods, the analysis reveals clear differences in frequency, syntactic distribution, and rhetorical function between the two centuries. While reinforcing adverbials such as indeed become more prominent over time, tentative forms such as perhaps and possibly are used strategically to preserve politeness, express contingency, and accommodate variability. These findings shed light on how women employed epistemic adverbials not only to structure instructional discourse but also to assert authority and manage interpersonal rapport in contexts shaped by social and rhetorical constraint.