Epistemic and Deontic Modality in Romanian and Serbian Scientific Discourse

Abstract

Modal verbs expressing epistemic and deontic modality can be used as discourse markers to implicate the authors’ attitude to the propositional content (doubt, certainty, hedging). Based on English modality framework, this paper discusses the uses of modals in expressing author’s attitude in Romanian and Serbian scientific discourse (social sciences and humanities) and compares these uses in the two languages.

Keywords

• deontic modality
• discourse
• epistemic modality
• romanian
• serbian