We
present a pragmatic analytical framework to explore the reasons underlying
the differences in the use of modal verbs in English research articles
(RAs) in three different academic disciplines: medicine, biology and literary
criticism. Sentences may be either modalized or unmodalized. The use of
modalized statements is a key feature of academic writing, and this expression
of modalization has been widely researched. However, most of this investigation
has not considered the linguistic distinctions of types of modalization:
epistemic modality (questioning the certainty or probability of a statement)
and deontic modality (laying obligations or giving permission to the reader/audience).
The linguistic dichotomy may be an important tool to describe disciplinary
variations in academic writing. It is hypothesized that different disciplines
favour different types of modality. Results in this study indicate that
scientific RAs (i.e., in medicine and biology) mostly use epistemic modality,
whereas literary criticism RAs combine the use of both epistemic and deontic
modality. It is our contention that the selection of one specific type
of modality (i.e., epistemic or deontic) is a matter of a deliberate stylistic
choice of writers influenced by the pragmatic context of their specific
and distinct academic discourse communities.