Article published in:
Transatlantic Perspectives on Late Modern English
Edited by Marina Dossena
[Advances in Historical Sociolinguistics 4] 2015
► pp. 135–151

Legitimising linguistic devices in A Cheering Voice from Upper Canada (1834)

| University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain
| University of Murcia, Spain
The present study categorises those devices concerning the expression of point of view in A cheering voice from Upper Canada (Colborne 1834). This book gives information about the English colony in Canada that is of value for prospective emigrants. The intention of the writer is to provide a detailed account of the benefits of living in Upper Canada, and why this is the ideal place for making profit. In addition, the writer has a very clear picture of the type of emigrants he envisages for the colony. Our objective is to explore legitimising devices in this book. Legitimising devices for us concern all those strategies leading to defence, support or justification of point of view. In this sense, this study covers matrices as well as other linguistic devices that are somehow indexical of the author’s position in the text. Our method follows from the model for the study of stancetaking proposed in Marín-Arrese (2009). We conclude that the author uses deontic modals to show authoritative voice whereas epistemic modality and internal/external participant modality have the persuasive function of promoting migration to Upper Canada. Moreover, the use of epistemic modals along with attitudinal expressions, communicative evidentials and cognitive matrices indicate a contrast between Canadian and old European social practices. The combination of these devices clearly leads to the fulfilment of the author’s intentions explicitly given in the introductory paragraphs of his book.
Published online: 12 February 2015
https://doi.org/10.1075/ahs.4.07alo
References

References

Primary sources

1834 Canadian tribute to Captain Ross. John Bull “For God, the King, and the People”, 12/01/1834.Google Scholar
Colborne, Sir John
1834 A cheering voice from Upper Canada: Addressed to all whom it may concern in a letter from an emigrant. London: T. Griffiths.Google Scholar

Secondary sources

Abraham, A. Kenneth
2010 Matthew Henry Study Bible. King James Version. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson.Google Scholar
Alonso-Almeida, Francisco
2012 Sentential evidential adverbs and authorial stance in a corpus of English computing articles. RESLA. Revista española de lingüística aplicada 25(1). 15–32.Google Scholar
Alonso-Almeida, Francisco. Forthcoming
. On the mitigating function of modality and evidentiality. Evidence from English and Spanish medical research papers. Intercultural Pragmatics 12(1).
Alonso-Almeida, Francisco & Margarita Mele-Marrero
2014 Stancetaking in seventeenth century prefaces on obstetrics. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 15(1). 1–35. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Bednarek, Monika
2006a Evaluation in media discourse: Analysis of a newspaper corpus. 
London: Continuum.Google Scholar
2006b Epistemological positioning and evidentiality in English news discourse: A text-driven approach. Text & Talk – An Interdisciplinary Journal of Language, Discourse & Communication Studies 26. 635–660. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Cameron, Wendy & Mary McD. Maude
2000 Assisting emigration to Upper Canada: The Petworth Project, 1832–1837. Ontario: McGill-Queen’s Press.Google Scholar
Campey, Lucille H.
2005 The Scottish pioneers of Upper Canada, 1784–1855: Glengarry and Beyond. Toronto: Dundurn.Google Scholar
Chafe, Wallace
1986 Evidentiality in English conversation and academic writing. In Wallace Chafe & Johanna Nichols (eds.), Evidentiality: The linguistic coding of epistemology, 261–272. Norwood: Ablex.Google Scholar
Cornillie, Bert
2009 Evidentiality and epistemic modality: On the close relationship between two different categories. Functions of Language 16. 44–62. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Cornillie, Bert & Nicole Delbecque
2008 Speaker commitment: Back to the speaker. Evidence from Spanish alternations. Belgian Journal of Linguistics 22. 37–62. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Kranich, Svenja
2009 Epistemic modality in English popular scientific texts and their German translation. Trans-kom 2(1). 26–41.Google Scholar
Magocsi, Paul R.
(ed.) 1999 Encyclopedia of Canada’s peoples. Toronto: Multicultural History Society of Ontario and University of Toronto Press.Google Scholar
Marín-Arrese, Juana I.
2004 Evidential and epistemic qualifications in the discourse of fact and opinion: A comparable corpus study. In Juana I. Marín-Arrese (ed.), Perspectives on evidentiality and modality, 153–184. Madrid: Editorial Complutense.Google Scholar
2009 Effective vs. epistemic stance, and subjectivity/intersubjectivity in political discourse. A case study. In Anastasios Tsangalidis & Roberta Facchinetti (eds.), Studies on English modality. In honour of Frank R. Palmer, 23–52. Bern: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
Martín-Martín, Pedro
2008 The mitigation of scientific claims in research papers: A comparative study. International Journal of English Studies 8(2). 133–152.Google Scholar
McLean, Scott A. & Michael E. Vance
2008 William Wye Smith: Recollections of a nineteenth-century Scottish Canadian. Ontario: Dundurn Press.Google Scholar
Mur-Dueñas, Pilar
2011 An intercultural analysis of metadiscourse features in research articles written in English and in Spanish. Journal of Pragmatics 43. 3068–3079. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Nuyts, Jan
2001 Epistemic modality, language and conceptualisation. A cognitive-pragmatic perspective. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Olson, James S. & Robert Shadle
1996 Historical dictionary of the British Empire. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.Google Scholar
Ortega-Barrera, Ivalla & Amelia Torres-Ramírez
2010 Estudio sobre los abstracts de artículos de investigación informáticos: evidencialidad y modalidad textual. Revista de lingüística y lenguas aplicadas 5(1). 141–153. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Palmer, Frank
1986 Mood and modality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Salager-Meyer, Françoise & Gerard Defyves
1998 From the gentleman’s courtesy to the scientist’s caution: A diachronic study of hedges in academic writing (1810–1995). In Inmaculada Fortanet & Tony Dudley-Evans (eds.), Genre studies in English for academic purposes, 133–173. Castelló: Universitat Jaume I.Google Scholar
Willet, Thomas
1988 A cross-linguistic survey of the grammaticalization of evidentiality. Studies in Language 12(1). 51–96. CrossrefGoogle Scholar