Modality and stance in the modern English part of the "Corpus of early English recipes"

Abstract

This paper deals with stance and the way this is expressed through modal verbs. It has been attested that modal verbs grammaticalize speakers' subjectivity (Fitzmaurice 2003: 108). For this, we revise modals in the Modern English part of the Corpus of Early English Recipes to assess their use, meaning and patterns of change in a time span of two centuries (1500-1700) in the recipe genre. Our working hypothesis is that writers' involvement and subjective assessments of facts will trigger changes in the paradigm of modal verbs to eventually shape their PDE codified meaning.