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Re-Assessing Modalising Expressions: Categories, co-text, and context
Edited by Pascal Hohaus and Rainer Schulze
[Studies in Language Companion Series 216] 2020
► pp. 253–280

Chapter 10
Epistemic modals in academic English

A contrastive study of engineering, medicine and linguistics research papers

| Universitat Politècnica de València, Spain
The hypothesis of this paper is that writers who belong to different specific fields of knowledge use dissimilar epistemic modals in academic English. The first specific objective is to identify and contrast the epistemic modals used in engineering, medicine and linguistics research papers and the second is to classify the phraseological patterns associated with epistemic modals in these specific settings. The method was based on a corpus-based approach and, for this purpose, fifty academic papers in English belonging to the field of engineering, fifty more from the domain of linguistics and another fifty from medical academic journals were compiled. The results showed that there were differences in the epistemic modals used and in the phraseological units composed in engineering, medicine and linguistics research papers. Finally, conclusions were drawn.
Keywords: epistemic modals, research papers, academic English, specialised language
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2. Epistemic modality
  • 3.Modality, academic writing and phraseological patterns
  • 4.Corpus
  • 5.Method
  • 6.Results
    • 6.1Expressions and value of epistemic modality
      • 6.1.1Modal adverbs
      • 6.1.2 Modal adjectives
      • 6.1.3Phrases/ mental state predicates
      • 6.1.4Modal nouns
      • 6.1.5Modal auxiliaries
    • 6.2 Orientation of epistemic modality
      • 6.2.1Subjective epistemic modality
      • 6.2.2 Objective epistemic modality
    • 6.3Collocations of typical epistemic modals
  • 7.Conclusions
  • References
Published online: 12 November 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.216.10lui
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