An Exploratory Study of Epistemic Modal Verbs in Results and Conclusions Sections of the Three Sub-corpora of Humanities & Social Sciences: Implications for L2 Academic Writing

Abstract

In this study, the use of epistemic modality in the category of modal verbs was comparatively examined in the results and conclusions 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 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. The aim of the study was to explore professional academic writers’ versatility and overall rhetorical awareness with regards to the use of epistemic modal verbs for academic argumentation in the three sub-corpora. In line with this aim, 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 also performed to determine any significant differences among the three sub-corpora. Findings of the study indicated that the most frequently used modal verbs in the results and conclusions section of the Research Articles sub-corpus are “may, would, could”, respectively; while the most frequently used modal verbs in the Theoretical sub-corpus are “will, would, may”, respectively. Lastly, the most frequently used modal verbs in the Review Articles sub-corpus are “may, will, would”. 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.