Genre types and modal meanings in Modern English texts written by women

Abstract

This paper is about the use of modal meanings as realized by modal verbs in late Modern English history texts written by women, as in The Corpus of History English Texts (Crespo and Moskowich 2015a), a subcorpus within the Coruña Corpus of English Scientific Writing. Our analyses follow from earlier considerations of modal meanings in early English (Crespo and Moskowich 2015b; Alonso-Almeida 2015), as well as studies dealing with modal verbs in scientific writing (Gray et al. 2011). In this context, our notion of modality mainly transpires Palmer’s ideas in this respect (1986 and 2001), although current literature on the topic is very much needed in order to account for specific contemporary uses identified in scientific writing (Carrió-Pastor 2014). Our notion of genre is that included in Martin (1984) within the framework of functional-systemic linguistics. Interrogation of the texts includes the use of the Coruña Corpus Tool, as this software allows the retrieval and excerption of data with a focus on modal verbs and their occurrences in specific textual genres and sex variables. Statistic figures on modal meanings are obtained to show generic variation, and these are normalized to 10,000 in order to evaluate and contrast results. Our working hypothesis, and expected outcome, is that the use of modals with a hedging function (Hyland 2005; Moskowich and Crespo 2014) will appear in genres exhibiting empirical contributions, and modals indicating authoritative nuances greatly qualify instructive genre types, say textbooks.