A corpus-based research on epistemic modality expressions as mitigation markers in British and American political speeches”

Abstract

The study aims at extensively investigating epistemic modality expressions used as mitigation markers that British and American leaders use in their political speeches. Through this, lexical entries and syntactic structures used as mitigation markers are analyzed through the method of corpus-based approach. Also, the similarities and differences in the use of epistemic modality expressions as mitigation markers in British and American political speeches are identified and analyzed. Last but not least, the study‘s findings are expected to contribute to the betterment in the use of modality devices, which facilitates the comprehension and application in English discourse analysis