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Article published In:
Register Studies
Vol. 2:1 (2020) ► pp.102–130

Stance and modals of obligation and necessity in academic writing

| Victoria University of Wellington

Variation has been demonstrated in modal use between written and spoken registers and between disciplines. This article investigates variation within a discipline by comparing modals of obligation and necessity used in three science genres. Obligation modals project strong authoritative stance, thus contrasting with the tendency in academic writing towards tentativeness. The modal auxiliaries must and should and quasi-modals have to and need to are investigated using student writing from the BAWE (British Academic Written English) corpus and a corpus of published research articles. Findings include a dearth of obligation modals in the empirical genres (research articles and laboratory reports). Also a greater prominence was found of dynamic modal meaning (where necessity arises from circumstances) rather than deontic meaning (where the necessity arises from human authority or rules). A further finding is the prominence of objective meaning in the science register compared with the International Corpus of English (Collins 2009a).

Keywords: obligation modals, stance, science writing, student writing, corpora
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Stance in academic writing
    • 1.2Modal meaning
    • 1.3Subjective and objective modality
    • 1.4The source of the obligation
    • 1.5Stance and obligation modals
  • 2.Methods
    • 2.1Data analysis
  • 3.Quantitative results
    • 3.1Obligation modals in academic and research writing in science
    • 3.2Comparison of the use of obligation modals in science and their use in a general English corpus
  • 4.Qualitative results: Meanings expressed and functions performed by modals in the three genres
    • 4.1 Must
    • 4.2 Should
    • 4.3 Have to
    • 4.4 Need to
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 10 April 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/rs.18012.par
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