An investigation into linguistic features of expressions denoting epistemic modality in the observer newspaper articles

Abstract

Modality as a property of language use is generally exploited by language users. Its role in newspaper is of special importance in which writers tend to make use of this property to establish either a favorable or unfavorable bias throughout the text to manipulate their readers’ opinion and attention. Through textual analysis of the selected business and review articles culled from The Observer 2007, the study investigates linguistic features of expressions denoting epistemic modality in these two kinds of newspaper articles in terms of syntactic structures and semantic categories via a corpus based-method. In this corpus-based research the mixed method of qualitative and quantitative analyses is used. The quantitative techniques will provide the statistical data of frequencies and patterns of modality markers (hereafter refer to as MMs) in the research corpora of The Observer 2007 whereas the qualitative approach is used as the functional interpretation of MMs in selected sentences. The software package of Wordsmith 5.0 is used to search for words and patterns of MMs to confirm the data coded, investigate and compare the frequencies of MMs occurring in the two research corpora. The tools used to undertake these tasks are word frequency, keyword lists and concordance lines. MMs throughout the 52 business articles and 52 review articles are coded and calculated to provide data for analysis. The results of a comparative analysis of MMs collected in the research corpora reveal that business articles and review articles are strikingly different in their frequency use of modality markers expressing opinions. Review articles are the discourse of critical analysis, so this discourse uses more modality markers to express attitudes, opinions and commitments whereas in business articles fewer MMs are used to expresses certainty and clear confirmability. iii Therefore, it can be claimed that higher frequencies of epistemic modality in review articles than in business articles indicate the characteristics of this discourse in expressing personal emotions, judgment and commitment