The pragmatics of clearly, evidently and obviously in the Corpus of English History Texts (CHET)

Abstract

This paper explores authorial stance as expressed by the use of clearly, evidently and obviously in the Corpus of English History Texts, one of the subcorpora of the Coruña Corpus. There seems to be widespread agreement that adverbials stand as one of the grammatical categories that most clearly contribute to the expression of interpersonal meanings (Hoye 1997; Biber and Finegan 1988). Clearly, evidently and obviously have been referred to as certainty adverbs (Aijmer 2008; Koutsantoni 2004), epistemic stance adverbs (Conrad and Biber 1999) evidential modal adverbs (Alonso-Almeida 2012; Simon-Vandenbergen and Aijmer 2007) and boosters (Hyland 2000). We will describe their use by eighteenth century writers of history texts so as to characterise them in terms of authorial presence. We will show that, depending on the context, they may fulfill several pragmatic functions such as indicating different degrees of authorial commitment or detachment towards the information presented, persuasion or politeness.