A disciplinary analysis of fairly in late modern English scientific writing

Abstract

This chapter reports on the uses and functions of the adverb ‘fairly’ in The Coruña Corpus of English Scientific Writing. The intention of this chapter is to explore how this adverb contributes to the elaboration of meaning. For this, a corpus-based quantitative and qualitative analysis of ‘fairly’ will be performed in order (a) to offer a categorisation of this adverb in the two subcorpora and (b) to show whether there are disciplinary differences in the use and functions of this adverb. Following previous studies on stance in the arena of historical pragmatics, I focus on ‘fairly’ as an example of a stancetaking feature in late Modern English texts to see how this form signals the authors’ position concerning their texts. Conclusions indicate that ‘fairly’ presents different meanings and functions in the 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.