5.4 Epistemic Marking in Middle English 143‘That I put no stock in laxatives, for they are poisonous, I know it well’
o. I may wel maken, as it semeth me , My resonyng of Goddes purveyaunce
(1380– 86 Chaucer, TC IV 1045)
‘I may well make, as it seems to me, my reasoning by God’s providence’
p. “Thanne it is wysdom, as it thynketh me ,/ To maken vertu of necessitee ...”
(1387– 1400 Chaucer, CT A.Mil. 3532– 33)
‘then it is wise, as it seems to me, to make virtue of necessity’
In a more general discussion of metadiscourse in Middle and Early Modern English,
Boggel (2009: 183) cites a number of these parentheticals (including I trowe , me
semeth , it semeth to me , me thinketh , I understande , I doute not , wel I wot ) as
“author- based stance- marking metadiscourse” which “makes explicit the author’s
personal opinion and evaluation of text content but can also be used to comment
on the addressee’s assumed stance” (3). She identifi es three main functions: evi-
dential , attitudinal, and self mention (e.g., I say ) (59– 60). There is a signifi cant
increase in both the forms used and the frequency of these markers from Middle
English to Early Modern English in her corpora, especially in secular as opposed to
religious texts (114, 116). However, she concludes that “stance cannot be regarded
as a metadiscursive element per se. Instead, it can be said that one possible function
of metadiscourse is to mark the author’s stance towards text content” (60).
5.4.2 Epistemic Adverbials
The rise of modal adverbs is usually dated to the EModE period or later
(Swan 1988b : 447ff.; see also Section 6.6.4). However, in her defi nitive
study of adverbials in the history of English, Swan ( 1988b : 250– 306; see also
González- Álvarez 1996 : 224) points to the existence in Middle English of a
well- developed class of “truth intensifi ers”:
high frequency: certes, trewly, forsoothe, soothly, verily, sikerly, peraventure, nedes, iwis,
certeynly, plainly, witerliche, dowteles, clerly
lower frequency: faythfully, in dede, evidently, dredeles, redyly, surely, clierliche, possibly,
actually, aperteliche, patently
12 Boggel ( 2009 : 20– 21, 22, 24– 25, 59) does not include adverbs such as sothely , forsothe , sekirly ,
certis among her metadiscoursive stance markers in Middle English because she sees them as
Swan notes that these adverbs typically express truth intensifi cation and empha-
sis, while in contrast, the expression of de- intensifi cation or minimization is rare
(356). González- Álvarez ( 1996 : 224– 225) sees in Middle English the very begin-
ning of a category of evidential adverbials (e.g., euidently ) as well as the emer-
gence of low- probability logical epistemic adverbials, including peradventure ,
percase , perchance , and haply. While Swan sees the low- probability class as not
fully developed as sentence adverbials ( 1988b : 306), González- Álvarez believes
that this subclass is “clearly disjunctive ” (1996: 225) in Middle English.^12