chapter 2 stance adverbs qualifying a standpoint - LOT publications

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NON-FINITE CLAUSE FINITE CLAUSE N. P. PREP. PHRASE ADV. P. SINGLE WORD ADVERB 48 TABLE 1 STANCE ADVERBIALS (Biber et al., 1999) Doubt & certainty Actuality & reality EPISTEMIC STANCE ATTITUDE STANCE STYLE STANCE Source/ Viewpoint or Evaluation; judgement; Limitation Imprecision evidence perspective assessment of expectations certainly, definitely, maybe, obviously, of course, perhaps, probably, undeniably, undoubtedly actually, really apparently, evidently, reportedly generally, mainly, typically about, approximately kind of, like, roughly, sort of amazingly, astonishingly, conveniently, curiously, disturbingly, fortunately, hopefully, inevitably, interestingly, ironically, predictably, quite rightly, regrettably, sadly, sensibly, surprisingly, unbelievably, unfortunately, wisely confidentially, figuratively, frankly, honestly, literally, seriously, truthfully most likely, quite likely for all I know, without doubt for a fact, in actual fact, in fact according to.. in general, in most cases, in most instances, on the whole from our perspective, in my opinion, in my view, in our view, in some cases, in the author’s view even more importantly, even worse, oddly enough, rather surprisingly to my surprise quite frankly, quite honestly, quite simply in a word, in brief, with all due respect no doubt I think, I guess, I bet, I would say, it seems, it appears as X notes if you can call it that as might be expected, as you might guess, as you would expect if I may say so, if you don’t mind my asking as a matter of fact so to speak most surprising of all, rather surprisingly more simply put, putting it bluntly, strictly speaking, technically speaking, to tell you the truth
STANCE ADVERBS QUALIFYING A STANDPOINT 49 2.3 Stance adverbs and the three ways of qualifying a standpoint Even though I take Biber et al.‟s (1999) presentation of stance adverbs as a starting point for exploring the linguistic realisation of qualification, I depart from it in some respects: First, I look at single word adverbs alone and do not consider any other grammatical realisation of stance, such as prepositional phrases, finite clauses, and so forth. That is why I refer to the group of adverbs that I study as „stance adverbs‟ and not as „stance adverbials‟. Single word adverbs constitute the most varied grammatical realisation of stance in English and are more frequent than other grammatical realisations of stance. Secondly, I do not consider these adverbs when they are used to add a comment about an element of a clause but only when they are used to comment on the whole clause. Cases where the stance adverb is used to qualify an element of the clause are illustrated in the following examples: (1) The entrepreneurial definition is clearly inappropriate here. [BNC] (2) It is surprisingly difficult to define aggression because it can take so many forms and be directed either inwards or outwards. [COBUILD] (3) A truly wonderful piece not only because of strength, but because the steel protects the normally brittle ceramic. [COBUILD] The standpoint that can be reconstructed from the above utterances, in which the qualifier scopes over an element of the main clause, could not be considered a qualified standpoint. This is because the comment that the adverb adds is part of the propositional content of the standpoint, not a comment about that propositional content or about the act as a whole. Thirdly, I do not follow the sub-classifications that Biber et al. propose neither do I always agree with the items that they list under these sub-groups. Table 2 on the next page lists the adverbs that I have selected from the list presented in the Appendix, under the three ways of qualifying a standpoint introduced in the preceding chapter. In the following subsections, I discuss each of these three groups, first by providing a brief overview of the literature concerning the linguistic status of the adverbs listed under each. I then present the discourse effect that I take these adverbs to have when they appear qualifying a standpoint.
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