ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we shall analyse medical abstracts belonging to research articles to see how stancetaking is manifested through the use of modal verbs in this textual genre. The medical research articles are part of a larger corpus which comprises research papers of several scientific fields including engineering and linguistics in English and Spanish. As modal auxiliaries may fulfil a wide range of textual, rhetorical, and interactional functions in a text, our goal is to unveil how they are deployed in these texts, and to describe the type of modal meanings exhibited. We also aim to provide insight into the communicative functions of modals in their genre- and discipline-specific use. In order to do this, we will use corpus linguistics methodology to analyse our body of data and to excerpt material to exemplify modal senses. As it is the abstract section of the paper, we predict a massive use of dynamic and epistemic modals to show (i) dynamic possibility, whose function is to show potentiality, and (ii) epistemic possibility/probability. This combination allows authors to present their ideas and external facts without really imposing their views.
