Epistemic disjuncts in early modern English

  1. Dolores González Álvarez 1
  1. 1 Universidade de Vigo
    info

    Universidade de Vigo

    Vigo, España

    ROR https://ror.org/05rdf8595

Revista:
International journal of corpus linguistics

ISSN: 1384-6655

Ano de publicación: 1996

Volume: 1

Número: 2

Páxinas: 219-256

Tipo: Artigo

DOI: 10.1075/IJCL.1.2.04GON DIALNET GOOGLE SCHOLAR

Outras publicacións en: International journal of corpus linguistics

Resumo

This paper offers a description of epistemic disjunct adverbs in Early Modern English. Section I outlines the development of epistemic disjuncts in the history of English, concentrating on the kinds of comment they could lexicalise.. Briefly, OE epistemic adverbs only encoded the speaker's comment on the high probability or importance of the proposition they related to. ME allowed a new type of comment, namely on the low probability of the adjoined proposition. In the second section, the data drawn from the computarised Helsinki Corpus suggest that though Early Modern English is a transitional period in epistemic disjunct development, it shows greater semantic diversification than OE and ME. Syntactic and distributional features are considered in every case. Finally, sociolinguistic variables and the registers and text types which favour the occurrence of these adverbs are also specified.