"If I miftake not" conditionals as stance markers in late Modern English scientific discourse

Abstract

The versatility of conditional structures makes them particularly useful in scientific discourse. Among other functions, conditionals may be used to convey the uncertainty of authors as to the form, relevance or veracity of the contents in a text. This study will analyse three types of conditionals used by authors to convey uncertainty, all of which can be said to be expressions of authorial stance. Selected conditional particles are drawn from three of the subcorpora in the Coruna Corpus. Following disambiguation, all occurrences of the three types of conditionals will be identified, and will then be analysed according to a series of parameters in order to see, a) whether the use of these types of conditionals is subject to any kinds of socio-historical constraints, and b) if there are particular correlations between the different types and particular formal characteristics.