Modal Verbs in Sustainability Reports by the University of Cambridge and the University of Oxford
Comparing Discursive Practices
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.15845/bells.v13i1.3719Keywords:
a corpus-assisted study, higher education institutions (HEIs), micro-linguistic means, modal verbs, sustainability discourseAbstract
This article presents and discusses a study on modal verbs in sustainability reports that are communicated online by the University of Cambridge (UC) and the University of Oxford (UO) in the United Kingdom. The study is based upon a contention proposed by Fløttum (2010), who posits that modal verbs are used in sustainability discourse as micro-linguistic means that are involved in a range of pragma-communicative strategies. Following Fløttum (2010), the present study seeks i) to establish the frequency of the occurrence of the so-called “central” modal verbs, i.e. can/could, may/might, must, shall/should, and will/would and ii) to identify their involvement in the programa-communicative strategies in the sustainability reports by UC and UO. The sustainability reports by UC and UO were analysed in the computer program AntConc version 4.0.11 (Anthony, 2022) in order to compute the frequency of the central modal verbs. Thereafter, they were analysed qualitatively to establish their relationship with a range of pragma-communicative strategies that were employed in the sustainability reports by UC and UO, respectively. The quantitative computer-assisted analysis indicated that can and will were the most frequent modal verbs in the UC’s and UO’s sustainability reports. However, the qualitative investigation demonstrated that can and will were associated with different pragma-communicative strategies in the reports. The findings were further discussed in the article.
References
Adams, Carol A. 2013. Sustainability reporting and performance management in universities: Challenges and benefits. Sustainability Accounting, Management and Policy Journal 4(3): 384-392.
Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y. 2007. Information source and evidentiality: What can we conclude. Rivista di Linguistica 19(1): 209-227.
Al Amin, Md, and Janinka Greenwood. 2018. The UN sustainable development goals and teacher development for effective English teaching in Bangladesh: A gap that needs bridging. Journal of Teacher Education for Sustainability 20(2): 118-138. https://doi.org/10.2478/jtes-2018-0019
Álvarez-Gil, Francisco J., and María Elena Domínguez Morales. 2021. Modal verbs in academic papers in the field of tourism. Revista Signos 54(106): 549-574.
https://doi.org/10.4067/S0718-09342021000200549
Anthony, Laurence 2022. AntConc (Version 4.0.11) [Computer Software]. Tokyo, Japan: Waseda University. Available from https://www.laurenceanthony.net/software
Biber, Douglas, Stig Johansson, Geoffrey Leech, Susan Conrad, and Edward Finegan. 1999. Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. Harlow, Essex: Pearson Education.
Bice, Sara, and Hamish Coates. 2016. University sustainability reporting: Taking stock of transparency. Tertiary Education Management 22: 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1080/13583883.2015.1115545
Ceulemans, Kim, Carol Scarff Seatter, Ingrid Molderez, Luc van Liedekerke, and Rodrigo Lozano. 2020. Unfolding the complexities of the sustainability reporting process in higher education: a case study in the university of British Columbia. In International business, trade and institutional sustainability. World Sustainability Series, Walter L. Filho, Paulo Borges de Brito, and Fernanda Frankenberger (eds.), 1043-1070. Cham: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26759-9_61
Cornillie, Bert, and Paola Pietrandrea. 2012. Modality at work. Cognitive, interactional and textual functions of modal markers. Available at https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-00665337/file/inpressCornillie-Pietrandrea-Intro.pdf
del Mar Alonso-Almeida, Maria, Frederic Marimon, Fernando Casani, and Jesus Rodriguez-Pomeda. 2015. Diffusion of sustainability reporting in universities: Current situation and future perspectives. Journal of Cleaner Production 106: 144-154. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2014.02.008
Diver, William. 1964. The modal system of the English verb. Word 20(3): 322-352. https://doi.org/10.1080/00437956.1964.11659826
Filippo, Daniela D., Javier Benayas, Karem Peña, and Flor Sánchez. 2020. Communication on sustainability in Spanish universities: Analysis of websites, scientific papers and impact in social media. Sustainability 12(19): 1-21. https://doi.org/10.3390/su12198278.
Filho, Walter L., Mihaela Sima, Ayyoob Sharif, Johannes M. Luetz, Amanda Lange Salvia, Mark Mifsud, Felicia Motunrayo Olooto, Ilija Djekic, Rosley Anholon, Izabela Rampasso, Felix Kwabena Donkor, Maria Alzira, Pimenta Dinis, Maris Klavins, Göran Finnveden, Martin Munashe Chari, Petra Molthan Hill, Alexandra Mifsud, Salil K. Sen, and Erandathie Lokupitiya. 2021. Handling climate change education at universities: An overview. Environmental Science Europe 33: 1-9. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12302-021-00552-5
Fløttum, Kjersti. 2010. A Linguistic and Discursive View on Climate Change Discourse. La revue du GERAS 58: 19-37.
Fløttum, Kjersti, and Trine Dahl. 2012. Different contexts, different “stories?” A linguistic comparison of two development reports on climate change. Language & Communication 32(1): 14-23.
Fløttum, Kjersti, and Øyvind Gjerstad. 2013. Arguing for climate policy through the linguistic construction of narratives and voices: The case of the South-African Green Paper “National Climate Change Response”. Climatic Change 118(2): 417-430.
Fløttum, Kjersti, Anje Müller Gjesdal, Øyvind Gjerstad, Nelya Koteyko, and Andrew Salway. 2014. Representations of the future in English language blogs on climate change. Global Environmental Change 29: 213-22. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2014.10.005
Fonseca, Alberto, Amanda Macdonald, Emily Dandy, and Paul Valenti. 2011. The state of sustainability reporting at Canadian universities. International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education 12(1): 22-40. https://doi.org/10.1108/14676371111098285
Gamage, Pandula, and Nick Sciulli. 2017. Sustainability reporting by Australian universities. Australian Journal of Public Administration 76(2): 187-203.
Garde Sánchez, Raquel, Manuel Pedro Rodríguez Bolívar, and Antonio M. López-Hernández. 2013. Online disclosure of university social responsibility: A comparative study of public and private US universities. Environmental Education Research 19(6): 709-746.
https://doi.org/10.1080/13504622.2012.749976
Glynn, Dylan. 2014. Quality and quantity. Object and method in the study of subjectivity and epistemic stance. In Subjectivity and Epistemicity: Corpus, Discourse, and Literary Approaches to Stance, Dylan Glynn and Mette Sjölin (eds.), 3-21. Lund: Lund University.
Guthrie, James and Adam Lucas. 2022. How we got here: The transformation of Australian public universities into for-profit corporations. Social Alternatives 41(1): 26-34. https://search.informit.org/doi/10.3316/informit.422944147026200
Hassan, Abeer, Mahalaximi Adhikariparajuli, Mari Fletcher, and Ahmend Elamer. 2019. Integrated reporting in UK higher education institutions. Sustainability Accounting, Management and Policy Journal 10(5): 844-876. https://doi.org/10.1108/SAMPJ-03-2018-0093
Huschová, Petra. 2015. Exploring modal verbs conveying possibility in academic discourse. Discourse and Interaction 8(2): 35-47.
Hyland, Ken. 2005. Stance and engagement: A model of interaction in academic discourse. Discourse Studies 7(2): 173-192. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461445605050365
Hyland, Ken. 2001. Bringing in the reader: Addressee features in academic writing. Written Communication 18(4): 549–74.
Hyland, Ken. 1996. Talking to the academy: Forms of hedging in science research articles. Written Communication 13(2): 251-281.
Hyland, Ken. 1995. The author in the text: Hedging scientific writing. Hong Kong Papers in Linguistics and Language Teaching 18: 33-42.
Hyland, Ken. 1994. Hedging in academic writing and EAF textbooks. English for Specific Purposes 13(3): 239-256.
Hyland, Ken, and Feng Jiang. 2016. Change of attitude? A diachronic study of stance. Written Communication 33(3): 251-274. https://doi.org/10.1177/0741088316650399
IBM. 2011. IBM SPSS Statistics for Windows, version 20.0. New York: IBM Corp.
Kafes, Hüseyin. 2015. Authorial Stance in Academic English: Native and Non-Native Academic Speaker Writer's Use of Stance Devices (Modal Verbs) in Research Articles. Unpublished PhD Thesis. Available at http://earsiv.anadolu.edu.tr/xmlui/bitstream/handle/11421/4214/190131.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y
Kapranov, Oleksandr. 2023a. Would in research article abstracts across three disciplines. In Modal Verbs and Modality: From Literary to Non-Literary Texts, Monika Skorasińska (ed.), 29-58. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Kapranov, Oleksandr. 2023b. Throwing soup at Van Gogh: The framing of art in climate change activism by British mass media. Discourses on Culture 19(1): 173-198. https://doi.org/10.2478/doc-2023-0008.
Kapranov, Oleksandr. 2022a. Modal verbs in research article abstracts in applied linguistics: Juxtaposing discursive practices of the Inner and Outer circles of English. East-West Cultural Passage 22(2): 6-34.
Kapranov, Oleksandr. 2022b. Discourse of sustainability in English language teaching at the University of Oxford: Analysing discursive representations. Journal of Teacher Education for Sustainability 24(1): 35-48. https://doi.org/10.2478/jtes-2022-0004
Kapranov, Oleksandr. 2022c. The syntax of climate change: Syntactic means in the construction of Greta Thunberg’s community identity on Facebook. Studia Universitatis Babes-Bolyai-Philologia 67(4): 15-33.
Kapranov, Oleksandr. 2021. Discursive representations of education for sustainable development in policy documents by English medium instruction schools in Estonia and Norway. Discourse and Communication for Sustainable Education 12(1): 55-66. https://doi.org/10.2478/dcse-2021-0005
Kapranov, Oleksandr. 2018. Conceptual metaphors associated with climate change in British political discourse. In New Insights into the Language and Cognition Interface, Rafał Augustyn & Agnieszka Mierzwińska-Hajnos (eds.), 51-66. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Kapranov, Oleksandr. 2017. Conceptual metaphors associated with climate change in corporate reports in the fossil fuels market: Two perspectives from the United States and Australia. In The Role of Language in the Climate Change Debate, Kjersti Fløttum (ed.), 90-109. New York/London: Routledge.
Kapranov, Oleksandr. 2016. Corpus analysis of discourse markers in corporate reports involving climate change. EPiC Series in Language and Linguistics 1: 216-227.
Kapranov, Oleksandr. 2015a. Do international corporations speak in one voice on the issue of global climate change: The case of British Petroleum and The Royal Dutch Shell Group. In Social Sciences and Humanities: A Global Perspective, Cem Can, Abdurrahman Kilimci, and Katarzyna Papaja (eds.), 306-322. Ankara: Detay Yayıncılık.
Kapranov, Oleksandr. 2015b. Conceptual metaphors in Ukrainian prime ministers’ discourse involving renewables. Topics in Linguistics 16(1): 4-16. https://doi.org/10.2478/topling-2015-0007.
Keck, Casey Mari and Douglas Biber. 2004. Modal use in spoken and written university registers: A Corpus Based study. In English Modality in Perspective. Genre Analysis and Contrastive Studies, Roberta Facchinetti and Frank R. Palmer (eds.), 3-25. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.
Kovalcikiene, Kristina, and Loreta Buksnyte-Marmiene. 2021. Doctoral students as future teachers at universities: Factors related to professional identity. Journal of Teacher Education for Sustainability 23(2): 45-61. https://doi.org/10.2478/jtes-2021-0016
Lee Ki-Hoon, Michelle Barker, and Agata Mouasher. 2013. Is it even espoused? An exploratory study of commitment to sustainability as evidenced in vision, mission, and graduate attribute statements in Australian universities. Journal of Cleaner Production 48: 20–28. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2013.01.00
Lozano, Rodrigo. 2011. The state of sustainability reporting in Universities. International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education 12(1): 67-78. https://doi.org/10.1108/14676371111098311
Melles, Gavin. 2020. Sustainability Reporting in Australian Universities: Case Study of Campus Sustainability Employing Institutional Analysis. In International Business, Trade and Institutional Sustainability. World Sustainability Series, Walter L. Filho, Paulo Borges de Brito, and Fernanda Frankenberger (eds.), 945-974. Cham: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26759-9_56
Miquelajauregui, Yosune, Louis A. Bojórquez-Tapia, Hallie Eakin, Paola Gómez-Priego, and Daniela Pedroza-Páez. 2022. Challenges and opportunities for universities in building adaptive capacities for sustainability: Lessons from Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean. Climate Policy 22(5): 637-651. https://doi.org/10.1080/14693062.2021.1985422
Molthan-Hill, Petra, and Lia Blaj-Ward. 2022. Assessing climate solutions and taking climate leadership: How can universities prepare their students for challenging times? Teaching in Higher Education 1: 1-11. https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2022.2034782
Mur-Dueñas, Pilar. 2016. Modal hedging verbs in English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) business management research articles. Kalbotyra 69: 153-178. https://doi.org/10.15388/Klbt.2016.10371
Nikolić, Vesna, and Tamara Vukić. 2020. Sustainability competencies from the University discourse. In Knowledge Based Sustainable Development, 71-1. University of National and World Economy: Sofia. Available at https://eraz-conference.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/ERAZ_2020-Selected-DRAFT.pdf#page=79
Nicolò, Giuseppe, Natalia Aversano, Giuseppe Sannino, and Paolo Tartaglia Polcini. 2021. Investigating web-based sustainability reporting in Italian public universities in the era of Covid-19. Sustainability 13: 1-12. https://doi.org/10.3390/ su13063468
Orta, Ignacio Vázquez. 2010. A contrastive analysis of the use of modal verbs in the expression of epistemic stance in business management research articles in English and Spanish. Ibérica, Revista de la Asociación Europea de Lenguas para Fines Específicos 19: 77-95.
Payne, Thomas E. 2011. Understanding English Grammar. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Plastina, Anna Franca. 2022. Changing discourses of climate change: Building social-ecological resilience cross-culturally. Text & Talk 42(4): 1-22. https://doi.org/10.1515/text-2020-0078
Ralph, Meredith, and Wendy Stubbs. 2014. Integrating environmental sustainability into universities. Higher Education 67(1): 71-90.
Rizomilioti, Vassiliki. 2006. Exploring epistemic modality in academic discourse using corpora. In Information Technology in Languages for Specific Purposes. Educational Linguistics, Elisabet A. Macià, Antonia S. Cervera, and Carmen R. Ramos (eds.), 53-71. Boston, MA: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-28624-2_4
Sady, Monika, Agnieszka Żak, and Karolina Rzepka. 2019. The role of universities in sustainability-oriented competencies development: Insights from an empirical study on Polish universities. Administrative Sciences 9(3): 1-20. https://doi.org/10.3390/admsci9030062
Salīte, Ilga, Ilona Fjodorova, Inese Butlere, and Oksana Ivanova. 2021. More personal knowledge for more sustainable higher education. Journal of Teacher Education for Sustainability 23(1): 150-165. https://doi.org/10.2478/jtes-2021-0011
Sassen, Remmer, Dominik Dienes, and Johanna Wedemeier. 2018. Characteristics of UK higher education institutions that disclose sustainability reports. International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education 19(7): 1279-1298. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJSHE-03-2018-0042
Skorasińska, Monika. 2014. “Can” in Shakespeare and Marlowe. Studia Anglica Posnaniensia 49(1): 31-55. https://doi.org/10.2478/stap-2014-0002
Soini, Katriina, Alexandra Jurgilevich, Japna Pietikäinen, and Kaisa Korhonen-Kurki. 2018. Universities responding to the call for sustainability: A typology of sustainability centres. Journal of Cleaner Production 170: 1423-1432. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2017.08.228
The University of Cambridge. 2022a. Sustainability. https://www.environment.admin.cam.ac.uk/
The University of Cambridge. 2022b. Environmental Annual Report. Available at https://www.environment.admin.cam.ac.uk/Annual-Report
The University of Oxford. 2022a. Sustainability. https://sustainability.admin.ox.ac.uk/home
The University of Oxford. 2022b. Environmental Sustainability Report 2020-21. Available at
https://sustainability.admin.ox.ac.uk/files/environmentalsustainabilityreport2020-21.pdf
Ton, Nu My Nhat, and Thi Dieu Minh Nguyen. 2020. A study om modality in English-medium research articles. VNU Journal of Foreign Studies 36(6): 74-92.
Vičič, Polona, and Klementina Jurančič Petek. 2016. The role of modal verbs in research papers in the field of logistics. Scripta Manent 11(1): 21-41.
Watkins, Matthew, and Vicky Lofthouse. 2010. A review of sustainability within product and industrial design courses in British universities. In DS62: Proceedings of E&PDE 2010, the 12th International Conference on Engineering and Product Design Education, Casper Boks, C. McMahon, William Ion, and B. Parkinson (eds.), 346–51. https://www.designsociety.org/publication/30177/
Weisser, Christian R. 2017. Defining sustainability in higher education: A rhetorical analysis. International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education 18(7): 1076-1089. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJSHE-12-2015-0215
Wodak, Ruth. 2015. Critical discourse analysis, discourse‐historical approach. In The International Encyclopedia of Language and Social Interaction, Karen Tracey (ed.),
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2023 Oleksandr Kapranov
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
