A corpus-based approach to the pragmatics of -ly adverbs in history texts

Abstract

This paper explores authorial stance as expressed by the use of diverse -ly adverbs in the Corpus of History English Texts (CHET), 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). The adverbs, object of this study, 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). I will describe their use by eighteenth and nineteenth century writers of history texts in order to characterize them in terms of authorial presence. I will show that, depending on the context, they may fulfill several pragmatic functions. Some of these are indicating different degrees of authorial commitment or detachment towards the information presented, persuasion or politeness, among others. The paper is structured as follows: first section offers a description of the Corpus of History English Texts. After that, I present the theoretical framework of stance and also comment on earlier literature on adverbials. Then, I analyse the findings and comment on some relevant examples to illustrate how some -ly adverbs work in the corpus. Finally, the conclusions derived from this study are offered. Regarding methodology, I have used the Coruña Corpus Tool for quantification and text retrieval. Afterwards, manual analyses have been performed as well in order to check stance adverbs’ functions in context. This tool simplifies the research to be done and the use of this tool combined with manual analysis is useful to obtain more accurate results.