A contrastive analysis of the use of modalverbs in the expression of epistemicstance in Business Management researcharticles in English and Spanish

摘要

In the present paper an intercultural quantitative and qualitative analysis of theuse of modal verbs as epistemic stance markers in SERAC (Spanish-EnglishResearch Article Corpus), a corpus of research articles (RAs) in differentdisciplines, is carried out. The corpus selected for this research consists of 48Business Management research articles. Special emphasis is laid on theintroduction and discussion sections of RAs, where stance devices are mostfrequently located to pursue convergence with the readership. This kind ofintercultural analysis has been achieved through both a bottom-up researchapproach and a top-down research approach. The results obtained in this studypoint in the direction that there are obvious differences between the use ofmodal verbs by native writers and the use of modal verbs by non-native Spanishwriters. The most remarkable aspect is that Spanish writers show a devianthandling of hedges and boosters. Therefore, they have difficulties in establishinga proper tenor when they write in English.