Perhaps …. But: Expanding and contracting alternative viewpoints

This chapter proposes, as a primary objective, to demonstrate how large and small corpora can reveal occurrences of complex grammatical patterns which realize particular features of “appraisal” (Martin and White, 2005), by moving back and forth between corpus data and full texts. The corpora used are a 10 million word corpus of all the 2003 sittings of the House of Commons and a 1 million word corpus of parliamentary events concerning the war in Iraq in 2003. A brief comparison will be made with findings from the BNC. The grammatical features that are highlighted could be seen from the point of view of Systemic Functional Grammar (Halliday and Matthiessen, 2004) as particular combinations of modality and cohesion, or from the point of view of appraisal theory as an aspect of engagement, or a combination of engagement and attitude. Members of the House of Commons engage in adversarial discourse; they speak for or against a particular position, but nonetheless they are expected to respect norms of politeness, or “pseudo-politeness”. One of the ways in which this is instantiated is by apparently “entertaining” an alternative viewpoint but then immediately closing this heteroglossic space by disclaiming it. There are several ways in which MPs enact this argumentative role, the chapter considers combinations of modal probability and adversatives and resources of “contraction”.