An analysis of probability and possibility modals in scientific abstracts on tourism

Abstract

This study deals with epistemic modal verb meanings in a corpus of academic abstracts of research articles in the field of tourism. The study of modality in the scientific domain and specialised texts is not new, as put forward in the works of Giltrow (2005), Hyland (1994), Cheng and Cheng (2014), and Biel (2014), among others. For our purposes, we will use a compilation of abstracts in English and published in specialized leading journals on tourism and this will be later analysed using corpus tools. The concordances recovered are analyzed with special attention to the context in order to detect first cases of probability and possibility modals, and second the epistemic meanings these forms convey. Our notion of modality follows the description in Nuyts (2001) and Palmer (2001), among others. In this particular paper, we want to evaluate the use and functions of probability and possibility modals in the above mentioned abstracts of research papers to identify the authors’ manifestation of tentativeness concerning the information they are given, among other communicative intentions. Our conclusions will deal with the functions of these modals in the texts analysed along with an account of their frequency.