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Abstract: The thesis sets out to investigate modality, which has been recognised as a central linguistic feature used for the expression of opinions and attitudes and thus also for establishing a dialogic relationship between the writer and reader. Following more recent, text-type oriented approaches to modality, which have recognised the importance of both genre- and discipline-specific conventions, the analysis aims to investigate modal verb use in different text types in logistics. Building on the finding that academic discourse is characterised by both objective (dynamic) and subjective (epistemic and deontic) presentation of claims it aims to establish to what extent the ratio between the two reflects genre- and discipline-specific use. The study is based on a combination of quantitative and qualitative (semantic) analysis, the results of which show that modal verb use in the analysed text types is characterised by a marked dichotomy between dynamic on the one side and epistemic and deontic use on the other, which, at least to some extent, could be related to the interdisciplinary nature of logistics. Furthermore, the analysed texts also show differences in the overall proportions of dynamic, epistemic and deontic use, which could be linked to the genre-specific style of each text type.
Keywords: modality, modal verbs, epistemic, deontic and dynamic meaning, text type, logistics
Published in DKUM: 18.10.2016; Views: 2001; Downloads: 141
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