Comparative analysis of epistemic modal verbs in the three sub-corpora of humanities & social sciences

Abstract

In this study, the use of epistemic modality in the category of modal verbs was comparatively examined in the abstract and introduction sections of journal articles written in the discipline of Humanities & Social Sciences. For this purpose, the Corpus of Journal Articles (CJA) 2014, which is a collection of 760 articles from high-impact journals in 38 disciplines, was used. The Humanities & Social Sciences, within this Corpus, consists of 23 sub-disciplines. The articles written in the discipline of Humanities & Social Sciences have further been divided into three sub-corpora: Research articles, Review articles and Theoretical articles. The CJA 2014 corpus consists of 6,015,063 words in total. This study investigated in quantitative terms the frequency analysis of the modal verbs “could, may, might, should, will, would, couldn’t, wouldn’t, shouldn’t” for the above-stated three sub-corpora in the Humanities & Social Sciences discipline. Log-likelihood tests were performed to determine any significant differences among the three sub-corpora. Findings of the study indicated that the most frequently used modal verbs in both the abstract and introduction sections of the Research Articles sub-corpus are “may, will, should, could”; while the most frequently used modal verbs in the Theoretical sub-corpus are “would, will, may, should”. Lastly, the most frequently used modal verbs in the Review Articles sub-corpus are “may, will, should”. Qualitative examples from the corpora were also provided in the manuscript. This study is expected to have important implications for academic writing in English for different research disciplines and different types of articles.

Keywords

• academic writing
• epistemic modality
• modal verbs
• journal articles
• research disciplines