Claiming Authority: Modals of Obligation and Necessity in Academic Written English. The Case of SHOULD

Abstract

The main concern of this paper is the use of the modal auxiliary SHOULD as a device for establishing the writer’s authority and managing the interaction with the reader of an academic text. The analysis is based on a corpus of 200 electronically available research articles published in the years 2001-2006 in five internationally recognised linguistics-related journals. Instances of SHOULD are classified according to their meaning as root, epistemic, quasi-subjunctive or hypothetical. Root SHOULD is classified as deontic or dynamic; epistemic SHOULD is identified as epistemic proper, inferred evidential or quotative evidential; quasi-subjunctive uses are examined for the possibility of root interpretation; and hypothetical SHOULD is studied for occurrences in subordinate clauses of condition and for uses with verbs of thinking and speaking. The findings indicate that the modal auxiliary SHOULD performs a variety of functions in academic discourse, from exhortation emphasising the speaker’s authority, impersonal directives relieving the speaker from the responsibility for issuing a command and suggestions put forward for consideration, through assessments of probability, to politeness strategies and attention-capturing devices.