Adverbial Marking of Stance in Speech and Writing

Abstract Conrad and Biber’s chapter is a statistical study of three collections of texts: one of conversations, one of academic writing, and one of news reportage. In this corpus they identify adverbials with a variety of grammatical forms: mainly adverbs such as probably, prepositional phrase such as in most cases, and subordinate clauses such as I think. These adverbials express meanings associated with the speaker or writer’s attitude, or stance, towards what he or she is saying.