A Pragmatic Analysis of Modality in English Academic Texts in Nigeria and Iraq

Mareb Mohammed Sangoor; Ahmed Mohammed Bedu

doi:10.30560/ilr.v8n2p57

Mareb Mohammed Sangoor College of Languages, University of Baghdad, Baghdad, Iraq
Ahmed Mohammed Bedu Department of Languages and Linguistics, University of Maiduguri, Maiduguri, Nigeria

DOI: https://doi.org/10.30560/ilr.v8n2p57

Keywords: pragmatics, discourse, context, epistemic modality, deontic modality, verb modal, non-verb modal modality

Abstract

Despite scholars’ attention on the typology of modality as a linguistic phenomenon, yet the use of modality across varieties of English is not well visible in communication-based researches that take semantics, pragmatics and discourse issues as the objects for their investigation. The paper generates its data from six M. A. dissertations from Nigerian University and equal number of the M. A. dissertations from Iraqi University to qualitatively and quantitatively investigate the contextual use of modality within the pragmatic perspective. The data analysis reveals that modality such as usuality, potentiality, necessity, probability and obligation in the dissertations encapsulates interpersonal and authorial voice in which the meaning of a clause is qualified to reflect the writer’s judgment of the likelihood of the proposition it expresses being true. The study findings also show the divergent use of modality to indicate certainty, possibility, probability and evidence and the nature of their illocutionary forces in the academic writings through verb modals and lexically modalized presentations in the MA. Dissertations that form the data of the study.

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