Alternative ways of expressing modality in corporate annual reports and their persuasive force
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| Year of publication | 2023 |
| Type | Conference abstract |
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| Description | Modal expressions in texts with a persuasive intent perform various functions, ranging from commitments to claims and goals and stating obligations, to judgments about the probability of events, actions and states. As the previous corpus analysis of persuasively functioning genres in corporate annual reports (Vogel in Dontcheva-Navratilova et al. 2020: 298-301) reveals, modal verbs are the prominent tool of hedging as well as boosting in specialised discourses, conveying usually epistemic (esp. likelihood and prediction), but also deontic and root modality (esp. obligation). However, all analysed specialised discourses contain some proportion of alternative ways of expressing modality, namely by constructions consisting of prop-it, copula be and predicative adjectives, by stance adverbs and by lexical verbs and nouns. These marginal devices expressing modality are explored with the aim of establishing a link between the prevalent persuasive function, modality type and corresponding adjectival, adverbal, nominal (as well as verbal) modal constructions realising it. A comparison of modal constructions gained from Anglophone corporate reports with equivalent constructions established in an analogous Czech corpus is also provided in order to confirm their persuasive function. The paper attempts to explain choices of different types of modality and their linguistic correlates which the corporate persuaders make in view of the intented impact on target readers. |