Modal Verbs in Sustainability Reports by the University of Cambridge and the University of Oxford: Comparing Discursive Practices
Abstract. This article presents and discusses a study on modal verbs in sustainability reports that are communicated online by the University of Cambridge (UC) and the University of Oxford (UO) in the United Kingdom. The study is based upon the prior literature (Fløttum, 2010) that posits that modal verbs play a range of pragmatic roles in sustainability discourse. Following Fløttum (2010), the present study seeks to establish the frequency of the occurrence of the central modal verbs (i.e., can/could, may/might, must, shall/should, and will/would) and to identify their pragmatic roles in the sustainability reports by UC and UO. The sustainability reports by UC and UO were analysed in the computer program AntConc version 4.0.11 (Anthony, 2022) in order to compute the frequency of their occurrence. Thereafter, the modal verbs were analysed qualitatively in order to establish their pragmatic roles in the sustainability reports by UC and UO, respectively. The quantitative computer-assisted analysis indicated that whilst can and will were the most frequent modal verbs in the UC’s and UO’s sustainability reports, the qualitative investigation demonstrated that can and will were associated with different pragmatic roles. The findings were further discussed in the article.
Key words: corpus-assisted study, modal verbs, sustainability discourse, the University of Cambridge, the University of Oxford
Key words: corpus-assisted study, modal verbs, sustainability discourse, the University of Cambridge, the University of Oxford
Publisert i Bergen Language and Linguistics Studies (BeLLS), 2023
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