Abstract
The aim of the present paper is to investigate the frequency and distribution patterns as well as the spectrum of modal meanings conveyed by the Lithuanian modal verb of possibility galėti ‘can/could/may/might’ in academic Lithuanian. The study is based on Corpus Academicum Lithuanicum (www.coralit.lt), a specialized synchronic corpus of written academic Lithuanian (roughly 9 million words). In order to allow a disciplinary comparison, the paper analyses the use of this modal verb in academic texts from three science fields: the humanities, the biomedical sciences and the technological sciences. Quantitative and qualitative approaches are employed alongside corpus-based analysis to reveal the ways in which this modal verb of possibility is used in academic language. The first part of the paper investigates the frequency patterns of various forms of galėti ‘can/could/may/might’ in the three science fields. The second part looks at the variety of meanings this modal verb can convey in Lithuanian specialised language. The results show that there is a fairly similar distribution of this modal verb across different science fields. In terms of its semantic functional capacities, galėti ‘can/could/may/might’ is used to convey all three types of modality (epistemic, deontic and dynamic), however, the most frequent use in Lithuanian academic discourse seems to be that of dynamic modality.
Highlights
Modality is one of the areas of linguistic inquiry that seems to enjoy a continuous interest of scholars throughout the years
The aim of the present paper is to investigate the frequency and distribution patterns as well as the spectrum of modal meanings conveyed by the Lithuanian modal verb of possibility galėti ‘can/could/may/might’ in academic Lithuanian
The qualitative part of the analysis looks at how different types of modality that galėtican/could/may/mightcan convey are realized in the three distinct science fields under study
Summary
Modality is one of the areas of linguistic inquiry that seems to enjoy a continuous interest of scholars throughout the years. Studies on epistemic modality have been very prolific, especially in the past several decades when the debates on the relationship between epistemic modality and evidentiality generated a new wave of linguistic interest. Non-epistemic modality or root modality, on the other hand, seems to have received less attention, at least as far as empirical studies are concerned. The distinction between epistemic modality and non-epistemic modality is generally clear. As Palmer notes in his seminal book of 1990, “[i]t is easy to show, especially with may and must, that there are potentially two very different uses of the modals.
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