One investigates or we investigate? Uses of modalization in research articles related to language

Abstract

This text exposes the first results of an analysis of a corpus composed by 1 260 articles about language published in Spanish between 2002 and 2018. The articles were published in Latin American specialized journals in social sciences and humanities and were downloaded from the citational index SciELO. The purpose of this article is to stablish frequent marks of modalization within the corpus, in order to analyze its use and function regarding what we call impersonality and personality effects of this discursive genre. The study was developed following the principles of corpus linguistics as well as the modalization category. Two software programs were used: Iramuteq and Lexico 5. Results show the prevailing frequency of delocutive marks in the repeated segments, particularly in those that we classified as generalization, condition, opposition and possibility. These results indicate that delocutive marks are enunciated as relatively fixed expressions and they seem to relate to author’s positions, positions which, as we argue, seem to be communicated by means of an impersonality effect.