Signalling deontic authority in academic abstracts

Abstract

In this talk, we want to identify, categorise and describe those language strategies aimed at signalling authority. We specifically focus on those devices that have a scope over the proposition, namely adverbials, modal verbs, and lexical matrices. The methodology of study includes the use of corpus tools for the identification and excerption of relevant data. Our corpus of abstracts will be made up of four subcorpora from the areas of linguistics, medicine, chemistry, and astrology. These fields of knowledge have their ownwell-established traditions of writing and have a long history of scientific publication. Forthe present study, we have collected material from the year 2000 up to 2018. Procedureof analysis includes the isolation of those devices entailing authority (e.g. necessity,obligation, advisability, and prohibition, among others). Categorisation of the resultsfollowing from our analysis is performed using Hyland‟s classification (2000), and this refers to those markers that explicitly show authoritative stance. This would rely also on our inspection of the context so as to safely identify deontic meanings. For this, we follow earlier literature on modality and stancetaking, such as Palmer (1986 & 2001), van der Auwera and Plungian (1998), Collins (2009), Hoye (2009), Alonso-Almeida and Carrió-Pastor (2017), to mention a few. Qualitative interpretation in terms of the pragmatic functions of these devices are also in order at this stage. Our findings will additionally report on variation concerning register so as to quantitatively evaluate disciplinary preferences of specific deontic devices.