When someone writes, “Surprisingly, …,” they are expressing their own surprise. It is equivalent to “To our surprise…,” except it is more succinct. Absent other context, there’s no implication that anyone else is surprised or should be surprised.
The “painting” is taking place either in additional context or in assumptions the reader is bringing into the interpretation. It is not present in the bare text.
It’s an ungenerous interpretation to suggest that people using “Surprisingly,” are immodest/imprecise/etc.. I could as easily hold the interpretation that “To our surprise…,” is the author trading my time in an attempt to get himself some goodwill from readers. However, that would be equally ungenerous.
How is "to our surprise" trading your time compared to "Surprisingly"? Is it because it contains more words?
The modesty here is about saying "We're not sure if this is generally surprising for everyone, but we were surprised". "Surprisingly" is a bit less conservative to me, its more of a "We think this is generally surprising for the field". I would personally use it only if I knew something has already surprised multiple research groups
The point isn’t how, but that the idea isn’t in the words. If I held that view, I’d be bringing in assumptions into the words that aren’t actually there in the words. This is true even if the author actually had those thoughts. The words simply don’t carry that information.
Human language is a social construct, and words carry whatever information users have decided to assign to it. Looks like quite a few language users disagree with you
Yes, you and people like you would read it as that they are expressing their own surprise, because you have a firm mental model that surprise resides only in the mind of the observer. But quite a few people also allow for a pseudo-objective meaning, as in "many/most people would find this surprising". Because the author may or may not be like you, it's hard to know which meaning the author intended, so if you want to communicate clearly it's best not to use the word "surprisingly" at all.
An author’s intent doesn’t change what an author actually said, nor does it mean we should assume it means something different. “Surprise” in any form should usually not be used, but if it is, the two phrases are still equivalent unless the context dictates otherwise or the author makes his use explicit.
>An author’s intent doesn’t change what an author actually said
This is an odd view of communication. It works for whole stories, e.g. you can decouple Heinlein from his books and claim that The Moon is a Harsh Mistress primarily says something other than Heinlein actually had in mind, artistically speaking, but it's a very odd stance for single words. Communication is two-way, it has everything to do with both the speaker and listener. Words don't have any meaning except for what the speaker and listener assign to them. There is no "what the author actually said", there is only what they intended to say (and how it was interpreted).
In the role of listener/reader, your whole job is to figure out what the author intended. Otherwise I'm not sure we agree on what reading even is.
We don’t have two-way communication or any context to understand the intention. We have “To our surprise…,” and “Surprisingly,….” These phrases in the context of writing, absent other context, have the same meaning. This isn’t really an opinion.
An author’s intention cannot be inferred without additional context. So no, the author’s intention per se does not matter in the context of this conversation. Extending that to mean it never matters isn’t at all what I said.
Whenever a speaker is talking about opinion or emotion, it is the speakers' opinion or emotion unless otherwise specified or contextualized. If I say, "We should eat pizza," the correct interpretation is that it is my opinion we should eat pizza. If I say, "In my opinion, we should eat pizza," the meaning is the same.
Surprise isn't an objective fact. It's a statement of emotion or subjective experience or whatever you'd like to call it. It is often a consequence of an objective difference between an expectation and a result. (An expectation can be subjective, but whether someone holds that expectation is either true or false.) But surprise isn't that objective difference, it's the subjective response.
So if I say, "Surprisingly, the sun rose today," absent other context it means I find it surprising that the sun rose today. It doesn't mean, "Everyone should find it surprising that the sun rose today." For that, I would need to add more context or you would need to bring in some assumptions that aren't supported by my statement. So, this is equivalent to "To my surprise, the sun rose today."
