Modal verbs in the abstract genre in the field of tourism

Abstract

This paper looks into the use of modal verbs in a corpus of abstracts excerpted from scientific papers in the field of tourism. These texts have been written by specialists in tourism studies. Our study will show the way in which modality is used to show the authors’ intention as to the contents of their texts. The pragmatic implications of modal uses will be highlighted bearing in mind the purposes of the abstractgenre within the academic paper. The methodology of study is corpus linguistics, and the framework of analysis includes the works of Palmer (1979; Palmer, 1986)and Collins (2009), among others. This paper is part of a larger research on modal verbs in touristic scientific papers.

Keywords

• Modal verbs
• modality
• mitigation
• English
• tourism