Author:

Keywords:

mirativity, epistemic modality, travel writing, science writing

Abstract:

When Charles Darwin’s first published On the Origin of Species in 1859 his novel ideas on evolutionary biology met with much criticism in the prevailing social context. But also his own deep-rooted Christian faith impacted the written presentation of his ideas. Following the first publication of this work five more editions by Darwin were published. These subsequent versions are marked by clear linguistic evidence of the increasing acceptance of his theory of natural selection by the author himself as well as the public. This increasingly positive reception also took place beyond the English-speaking world, through various translations in different European languages (cf. i.a. Brisset, 2002; Algoet, 2008; Vandepitte, Vandenbussche, & Algoet, 2011; Pano & Regattin, 2015). This paper will focus on the evolving expression of degrees of certainty and author commitment in Darwin’s successive six English editions of On the Origin of Species, published between 1859 and 1872, as well as the seed-bed of Darwin’s original ideas which led to the gradual development of his theory, viz. his observations during the voyage of the Beagle. Darwin’s evolving author commitment in On the Origin of Species is examined through the expression of epistemic modality in chapter four of this work, which presents the theory of natural selection. The analysis takes a systemic-functional approach (Halliday, 1994; Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004), which considers expressions from different word classes, in addition to the closed grammatical set of English modal auxiliaries. The corpus data are based on the Online Variorum of Darwin's On the Origin of Species, which offers an aligned representation of the six British editions of the account written by Darwin. The general evolution in Darwin’s commitment to his scientific ideas is evaluated in terms of a formulaic assessment which includes seven degrees of probability and degree of objectivity as a factor of implicit versus explicit modality and objective versus subjective modality. The overall results of this analysis show an unmistakable increase of positive (69%) author commitment to the certainty of the scientific ideas expressed in the successive editions of On the Origin of Species. The level of author commitment expressed in the final (1872) edition of On the Origin of Species came about as the culmination of a long personal mental journey from Christian faith through evidence which originated in Darwin’s observations during the second voyage of the Beagle between 1831 and 1836. The second, revised edition of Darwin’s earlier (1839) account of his observations during this journey was published in 1845 and later received the title The Voyage of the "Beagle" (1905). This second edition, made available online by the Project Gutenberg, forms the basis for the corpus of the analysis for this part of the present paper. The analysis will focus on chapter XVII of the work, which contains Darwin’s observations on the Galapagos Archipelago, and will add the category of mirativity, a linguistic category which refers to the expression of the speaker's or writer’s surprise (and which more strictly speaking refers to language systems that contain a grammatical category of mirativity for the expression of this meaning, often discussed and expressed together with evidentiality (cf. Delancey, 1997, 2001). Mirative expressions in this account (e.g. “Hence we have the truly wonderful fact, that …”, or “we feel the more astonished at …”) show us the origins of Darwin’s later scientific ideas. Through the combined analyses of corpus data from travel literature and an ensuing scientific account and theory this paper hopes to offer an illustration of the mental journey which is often engendered by geographical travel, entailing foreign evidence of and surprise at new ways of life, with possibly transformative effect, long after the geographical journey took place.