A Matter of Opinion: Stance Taking in Late Modern English Historiography

This contribution is a preliminary study in historical pragmatics, aiming to discuss the main strategies employed in CHET for the expression of stance in relation to events and people. In particular, the focus is on methodological issues concerning the analysis of greater or lesser personalization and of expressions of (un)certainty and evaluation, understood as essential strategies to convey point of view in acceptable ways within the cultural framework in which individual works were published. After a brief overview of significant caveats in studies of historiography in a linguistic perspective, my analysis will consider the samples in CHET as instances of Late Modern English academic writing; where applicable, comparisons will be made with similar data in CEPhiT.