This paper complements previous research into the late Modern English scientific writing uses of the adverbs possibly and perhaps as manifestations of either subjectivity or intersubjectivity, as presented in the Coruña Corpus of English Scientific Writing. In order to have a better understanding of the uses of these adverbs as markers of tentativeness, we will explore their syntagmatic relations with modal verbs. It is widely assumed that scientific discourse has an objective nature, although it has been questioned by its use of hedging and other expressions of stance. In the present study, we will assess how modal verbs accompanying these stance adverbs modulate the expression of tentativeness. The use of stance adverbs shows authorial presence and a covert interaction with the reader. The paper examines different degrees of hesitancy depending on the type of modal verb accompanying these adverbs. The analysis has been carried out on four subcorpora of the Coruña Corpus of English Scientific Writing. Our findings will be presented from a more general to a more detailed account for each of the forms under investigation and interpreted taking into account the variables ‘date of publication’ and ‘genre’ for the text, and ‘sex’ for the author.

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This volume includes methodological considerations and descriptions of some of the texts compiled in The Corpus of English Texts on Astronomy (CETA), together with a number of pilot studies using these texts showing how the corpus can be used to investigate English Astronomy writing between 1700 and 1900, from a synchronic and a diachronic perspective. CETA is part of the Coruña Corpus of English Scientific Writing (CC). Since the CC was designed in 2003 with a sampling method by which extracts of 10,000 words were selected, this method has been followed in CETA, with samples from 42 different authors both from Europe and North America. Some extralinguistic parameters, such as year of publication, sex, geographical provenance and text-types/genres have been considered for text selection. According to late Modern English text typology, the samples in CETA can be grouped in eight different categories and such categories, as well as some other metadata information, can be used to search the corpus. CETA, together with the Coruña Corpus Tool purpose-designed software by IrLab, was originally made available with the volume on CD-rom. As of early 2019, these are also accessible online at the Repositorio Universidade Coruña: CCT at http://hdl.handle.net/2183/21850and CETA at https://doi.org/10.17979/spudc.9788497497084

The aim of this paper is to offer a description of four of the existing subcorpora of the Coruña Corpus of English Scientific Writing. Both the principles of compilation and the sociolinguistic variables considered during the process of text selection will be described. The editorial practice underlying the computerisation of texts, as well as several pilot studies, will also be discussed.

This paper describes one of the concerns of corpus compilers when gathering samples of texts. In particular, it explores how to classify such samples in wider categories in the case of the Corpus of English Chemistry Texts (CECheT), one of the subcorpus of the Coruña Corpus of English Scientific Writing. To this end, authors have revised the literature to find (and try to solve) the terminological mess that includes laves such as genre, text-type and textual category. These laves have been widely related either to the form or the function of the text. In this paper the idea of "communicative format" is used to bring together form and function as they are seen as intermingled in texts at all levels.