Puente-Castelo, Luis2026-01-272026-01-272021Puente-Castelo, Luis. 2021. “'If you will take the trouble to inquire into it rather ‎ closely, I think you will find that it is not worth very much': Authorial presence through conditionals and citation sequences in late modern English life sciences texts”. In Moskowich, Isabel; Lareo, Inés and Camiña Rioboó, Gonzalo (eds.), "All families and genera": Exploring the Corpus of English Life Sciences Texts. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 190–208 ISBN 97890272092459789027209245https://hdl.handle.net/2183/47102[Abstract] One of the main features of the process of change in scientific register during the late Modern English period was the change in the position of the author in the text, as it evolved from a text-centred model, scholasticism (Taavitsainen & Pahta 1998), towards, first, an author-centred model, the so-called rhetoric of immediate experience (Atkinson 1996: 335), and, later, an object-centred approach, characterized by avoiding the use of “direct indexes of the author” (Atkinson 1996: 341), using some of the stereotypical characteristics of contemporary scientific writing, such as nominalisations, objectifications, or the use of the passive voice, instead. However, this process of evolution towards objectivity coexisted with a parallel process by means of which science became a social practice in which the role of the scientist as a member of a community of common experience, and the relations they develop with their peers, became crucial (Bazerman 1988, Myers 1989, Swales, 1990). Authors then started to have to modulate their language, looking for a precarious equilibrium between furthering their positions and ideas and trying to achieve a good reception for them in the community, thus bringing up the use of a series of rhetorical strategies with that aim (Allen, Qin and Lancaster 1994, Hyland 1996, 1998). The expression of uncertainty is one of the contexts in which these rhetorical strategies appear. Authors wanting to express their uncertainty, either about the veracity, the relevance, or the form of a claim, or, even, their own knowledge, use a series of linguistic devices, such as the use of particular types of conditionals structures (Warchal, 2010), or certain structures when introducing a quotation (Hunston 1993), by means of which they convey their uncertainty in a more or less covert way. This chapter will examine the use of these different strategies in CELiST, the subsection on life sciences of the Coruña Corpus of English Scientific Writing.engAuthorial presenceConditionalsCitationsScientific writingLate Modern EnglishCoruña Corpusbook partembargoed access