Uses of modal verbs in academic writing

Paul Thompson (Reading, UK)

This paper is concerned primarily with the investigation of academic writing practices at
British universities. It focuses on the products of student writers, in the form of a small
number of PhD theses that have been submitted and accepted at one British university. The
corpus is investigated through a mixture of quantitative and qualitative analyses, and the
aspect of the texts examined is the different functions that the modal auxiliary verbs perform
in the construction of these complex rhetorical entities.
Nash (1990:9) poses the question, ‘Is “academic writing” a genre, as, in a broad sense,
“journalism” is a genre?” The question is of importance to, among others, EAP practitioners
whose job it is to prepare international students for the task of writing in academic settings. Is
there a core of generic features of academic writing that can be taught to students in different
disciplines, or are the practices extremely diverse? Can, or should, we teach molecular
biologists, for example, the same writing functions, strategies and skills as we do historians?
Genre studies in EAP have concentrated on the research article, with Swales’s move analyses
being highly influential. Recently, however, there has been a shift of interest to student-
generated texts (eg, Dudley-Evans 1999, Thompson 1999). There has also been increased
awareness of the need to research writing practices in different disciplines, and to analyse
complete texts. PhD theses are long texts, and therefore have received less attention than
shorter texts. A corpus-based approach to the study of thesis as genre, however, promises to
make these texts more tractable to analysis.
The approach taken in this study is to look at the roles that the core modal auxiliary verbs
(may, might, can, could, will, would, shall, should, must) play. The modal auxiliaries are
chosen because they are used to perform many important functions in academic text, not least
that of qualifying statements (in their epistemic senses), but also in their roles of indicating
what is known as potential outcomes, and for forming hypotheses. It is also expected that
modal auxiliaries are employed in all sections of a thesis and therefore analysis of their use
will give an indication of the macro-organisation of a thesis.
The data used for this study are taken from the Reading Academic Text corpus. The present
study focuses on PhD theses that were written in two departments at the university:
Agricultural Botany, and Agricultural and Food Economics.
This paper will report on a set of analyses of sections of the theses, and reflect on the
implications for pedagogy.

Bibliography
Dudley-Evans, A. (1999). “The dissertation – a case of neglect?” In P. Thompson (ed.) Issues
in EAP Writing Research and Instruction Reading: CALS, The University of Reading.
Nash, W. (1990). “The stuff these people write.” In W. Nash (ed) The Writing Scholar:
Studies in Academic Discourse. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.
Thompson, P. (1999). “Exploring the contexts of writing: Interviews with PhD supervisors” In
P. Thompson (ed.) Issues in EAP Writing Research and Instruction Reading: CALS, The
University of Reading.