This paper complements previous research into the late Modern English scientific writing uses of the adverbs possibly and perhaps as manifestations of either subjectivity or intersubjectivity, as presented in the Coruña Corpus of English Scientific Writing. In order to have a better understanding of the uses of these adverbs as markers of tentativeness, we will explore their syntagmatic relations with modal verbs. It is widely assumed that scientific discourse has an objective nature, although it has been questioned by its use of hedging and other expressions of stance. In the present study, we will assess how modal verbs accompanying these stance adverbs modulate the expression of tentativeness. The use of stance adverbs shows authorial presence and a covert interaction with the reader. The paper examines different degrees of hesitancy depending on the type of modal verb accompanying these adverbs. The analysis has been carried out on four subcorpora of the Coruña Corpus of English Scientific Writing. Our findings will be presented from a more general to a more detailed account for each of the forms under investigation and interpreted taking into account the variables ‘date of publication’ and ‘genre’ for the text, and ‘sex’ for the author.
This paper describes one of the concerns of corpus compilers when gathering samples of texts. In particular, it explores how to classify such samples in wider categories in the case of the Corpus of English Chemistry Texts (CECheT), one of the subcorpus of the Coruña Corpus of English Scientific Writing. To this end, authors have revised the literature to find (and try to solve) the terminological mess that includes laves such as genre, text-type and textual category. These laves have been widely related either to the form or the function of the text. In this paper the idea of "communicative format" is used to bring together form and function as they are seen as intermingled in texts at all levels.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.