Modal Verbs in English-Medium Research Articles on the Issue of Climate Change and Health

Abstract

The article introduces a quantitative study that examines how modality, which is associated with modal verbs (e.g., must, would, etc.), is represented in English-medium research articles (henceforth – RAs) that are published in specialised scientific journals that focus on the intersection of climate change-related research and health. The aim of the study was to collect a corpus of RAs published in the international peer-reviewed journals Eco-Environment and Health and The Journal of Climate Change and Health and examine the frequency of the occurrence of modal verbs in order to determine the most frequent modals in the corpus. To that end, the corpus was analysed in the software program AntConc (Antony, 2022) in order to establish the frequency of the central modal verbs in English, such as can, could, may, might, must, shall, should, will and would. The results of the quantitative investigation revealed that can and may were the most frequent modal verbs in the corpus. The findings were discussed through the lens of the discourse on climate change and health.