This paper investigates modals in Linguistics and Engineering research articles. The study has two main objectives. The first one concerns the identification and categorization of modals used in research articles written in English by native speakers. The second objective is of a contrastive nature. We are much interested in measuring the use and function of modals according to register. For this study, we focus on material traditionally categorized as belonging to the realm of the humanities, e.g. linguistic research, and material categorized as belonging to the hard sciences, e.g. engineering research. Without further considerations as to the suitability of these categories, we want to explore on the motivations behind the use of modals in these branches of scientific thought. Our corpus was gathered for this purpose in mind with a selection of papers from the humanities and the hard sciences. Although corpus tools are fundamental for statistical representations, manual analyses are also important in order to detect pragmatic use of language denoting authority or lack of it. Our conclusions report on the motivations leading to the use of modals in relation to register.
Informational-persuasive discourse may be encoded in promotional strategies through which a given product is
described in a positive way to persuade potential customers. For this, evaluation may appeal to reason or may tickle emotions
(Cook, 2001). This study compares the way in which advertising texts for herbal tea
engage with customers’ emotions in English and in Spanish. We examined the strategies of ‘enjoying the experience’ and ‘aesthetic
appeal’ from an Appraisal Theory approach (Martin and White, 2005). We categorised
these according to the attitude sub-systems of ‘affect’, ‘appreciation’, and ‘judgement’, determined how explicit the evaluation
was, and identified gradable resources. Results show that English texts display more ‘affect’-like resources that can awaken a
desire in the customer. By contrast, in the Spanish sample ‘appreciation’ resources that evaluate the composition of the product
play a greater role. ‘Enjoying the experience’ seems to engage with the customers’ emotions more overtly than ‘aesthetic
appeal’.
This paper explores the discourse functions of certainly and its Spanish equivalents in the genre of newspaper opinion discourse. Certainty markers seem to have a presence intrinsic to the opinion genre and, therefore, are expected to “exhibit a certain uniformity across languages” (Dafouz, 2008, p. 110). Whereas the non-correspondence between certainly and ciertamente soon becomes apparent, the results of earlier studies (Ramón, 2009; Carretero, 2012) might well lead to the hypothesis that the PPs sin duda and desde luego realize in Spanish opinion articles the same discourse functions as certainly does in English newspapers. Drawing on naturally-occurring linguistic data from a corpus of English and Spanish opinion texts (C-OPRES), this study (1) investigates the non-correspondence between cognates and (2) explores the aforesaid research hypothesis. Finally, a translation corpus is used (P-ACTRES) to address the complex relationships between seemingly equivalent words, filling in the gaps of the contrastive analysis. The findings reveal a partial overlap between certainly and its Spanish counterparts as epistemic markers or in concessive contexts; whereas there are also significant differences in the distribution of other discourse functions, mainly regarding the emphasizing use of certainly and the grammaticalization of its so-called equivalents in Spanish as textual and/or interpersonal discourse markers.
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