Lexical Expressions of Possibility in Specialized Discourse: a Corpus-based Analysis

In the last decades, there has been a growing interest in how specialized discourse is constructed (Hyland 1998, Gotti and Dossena 2001). In spite of the objectivity which is usually attributed to specialized discourse, subjectivity eventually surfaces when using modality, whereby authors take a stance on what is being argued, thus revealing their commitment to the factuality of the statements exposed. Accordingly, the aim of the present article is to discuss the use of possibility (one of the values included within modality) in specialized discourse by resorting to a corpus of research articles compiled from several journals devoted to the field of Engineering. This corpus of written texts, which is a sizeable sample of more than three million words, will allow us to analyse how several lexical devices (that is, nominal, adjectival, adverbial and verbal) other than modal verbs are used to express possibility. The frequency of these expressions in the abstracts and the articles themselves will be also examined, highlighting any possible difference observed between them.