Analysis of the linguistic expression I think in a corpus of late Modern English scientific texts

Abstract

The present paper deals with the relationship between modality and evidentiality, focussed specifically on the use of the expression I think in combination with other modal devices, as well as the possible pragmatic effects observed in text samples obtained from the Coruña Corpus of English Scientific Writingand whether the variable of discipline might have some effect on the functions the expression represents in these texts.Even if much research is still to be done in academic texts from a diachronic perspective, there are some previous studies on stance devices carried out within the arena of historical pragmatics (cf. Gray, Biber and Hiltunen 2011; Moskowich and Crespo 2014; Alonso-Almeida 2015). Following this tradition, we focus on the expression I think, following the work of van der Auwera and Plungian (1998) for the description of modality and modal types.