Fairly in Modern English history and astronomy academic texts

Abstract

This paper reports on the uses and functions of fairly in CHET and CETA, two subcorpora within The Coruña Corpus of English Scientific Writing (1700-1900)). The main reason to choose the adverb fairly lies in my interest to see whether this adverb may show epistemic or evidential nuisances in scientific discourse (Chafe 1986, Simon-Vandenbergen and Aijmer 2007), and whether the variable of discipline might have some effect on the categorization of fairly in these texts. My purpose is to explore how this adverb contributes to the elaboration of meaning of whatever nature (cf. Biber and Finegan 1988). For this, a corpus-based quantitative and qualitative analyses of fairly will be performed in order (a) to offer a categorization of this adverb in these subcorpora, and (b) to show whether there are disciplinary differences in the use and functions of fairly in this period of the English language. In my inspection of instances, I consider the context in which this form appears embedded. This means especially the syntactic context, since it has some important effects on the pragmatics of this and other adverbs, as I have shown elsewhere (Álvarez-Gil 2017). Even if much research is still to be done in academic texts from a diachronic perspective, there are some previous studies on stance devices carried out within the arena of historical pragmatics (cf. Gray et al. 2011; Moskowich and Crespo 2014; Alonso-Almeida and Mele-Marrero 2014). Following this tradition, I focus on fairly as an example of a stancetaking feature to see how this form signals authorial position. Conclusions indicate that fairly presents different meanings and functions in our two compilations, some of which are mutually exclusive. This means, for example, that fairly may be used both to mitigate and to strengthen propositional content (Markkanen and Schröder 1997; Mauranen 1997; Hyland 2005).