‘Noticeably Better / Visibly Shaken’: The Use of Four Adverbs of High Perceivability with Meanings of Attitude

Abstract

This paper is a study of the use of four adverbs of high perceivability, manifestly, noticeably, patently and visibly (MNP&V), with expressions loaded with evaluative meanings belonging to the Appraisal category of Attitude. The paper starts with a characterization of MNP&V in terms of their meanings of manner and evidentiality and also as devices of Engagement within the Appraisal framework. Next, an analysis is carried out of the occurrences of the adverbs in the British National Corpus, in terms of the Attitude meanings present in the linguistic units of which MNP&V are constituents. The results show that these stretches of language often express Attitude, and that the distribution of the subtypes of Attitude varies across the individual adverbs. All the adverbs except noticeably are strongly associated with negative evaluation, which shows their frequent use for justifying high commitment to the truth of an undesirable proposition on the grounds that this truth is highly perceivable.

Keywords:

• Adverbs
• perceivability
• evidentiality
• manner
• (un)desirability
• Appraisal
• Attitude
• Engagement

Acknowledgments

This research has been carried out as part of the Research Project with reference number PID2021–125327NB-I00, funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (MCIN) and the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF). I gratefully acknowledge the support provided by the funding entities.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 The label “Appraisal Theory” is widespread, but I will be use the term “framework”, since I believe that it better described as a method of analysis of evaluative language within Systemic Functional theory rather than a theory by itself. The term “framework” is the one which appears in the Appraisal website (accessed February 13, 2022) https://www.grammatics.com/appraisal/

2 The BNC is also available online, in the version created by Brigham Young University (BYU), at http://corpus.byu.edu/bnc/.

3 Halliday and Matthiessen (2014) do not explicitly include any of MNP&V as interpersonal Comment Adjuncts, but they include similar adverbs of high perceivability such as evidently, obviously and plainly.

4 Carretero (2020, 54) shows that this characterization is also valid for the similar adverb clearly and its Spanish cognate claramente.

5 https://www.graphpad.com/quickcalcs/kappa1/?K=4

6 For a more detailed account of the experiments and their results, see Carretero (2022).