Head nouns as modal stance markers –academic texts vs. legal texts

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to substantiate on the one hand that head nouns are modal expressions allowing the writer to mark her stance in the text. On the other hand, it shows that the purpose and the social role of a text can be perceived in both its lexical expressions and grammatical patterns. Thus, this paper, which is a corpus-based study, shows that the use and the frequency of head nouns are distributed along text genres. The paper also agues that head nouns and that-clauses in which they appear may not have the same communicative functions and effects according to text genres, which is to say that the same head noun or that-clause may not have the same discursive functions or effects in two genres of text. The contrast between legal and academic corpora has enabled us to substantiate these claims.