| Modality is always a hot topic in study of linguistics, many scholars have researched on it. Modality can be expressed by a variety of language forms, but the commonest is using modal verbs. However, due to the complexity of the semantic and pragmatic meaning of modal verbs, the definition and classification of modal verbs are still vague. Besides, many previous investigations into modal verbs seldom involve the introduction section, which is the general idea of the whole research article. The purpose of introduction is to introduce the main content and related background of the article and to attract readers, so its importance is self-evident.According to adaptation theory, language use is the process of choosing language consciously or unconsciously, in which the choice is not arbitrary, but adapts to certain language factors. So the paper will comparatively investigate the modal verbs in introduction sections of Education and Engineering academic discourses based on Verschuren’s adaptation theory, and attempt to answer the following three questions: 1). How are nine modal verbs distributed in Education and Engineering RA Introductions and what are the similarities and differences between them? 2). How is the contextual adaptability reflected in using modal verbs in RA Introductions? 3). How are modal values related to contextual adaptability in Education and Engineering RA Introductions?In order to answer the three questions, the paper will select 60 introduction sections in fields of Education and Engineering respectively according to stratified sampling from the latest journals, which are published in 2013 and 2014, and then two small corpora will be built with the collected data. The paper is a quantitative and qualitative study, each modal verb will be labelled by hand, and with the help of Antconc 3.4.3, the selected data will be retrieved, thus the author can get the frequency of each modal verb and modal value in introduction sections of Education and Engineering articles. On the basis of quantitative analysis, the paper will explore how the modal verbs in introduction sections of academic articles adapt to the context, and then it will comparatively analyze the differences of modal values in introduction sections of Education and Engineering articles in contextual adaptability.The results show that modal verbs in introduction sections of academic articles meet the writer’s and reader’s mental needs, adapt to the politeness principle, academic norms and the interaction between writers and readers in social world, as well as the physical world in both form and content. Secondly, there exist some differences in modal verbs in contextual adaptability between Education and Engineering RA Introductions, which mainly reflects in modal values. In Education, authors tend to select more low value modals to adapt to social world, while in Engineering, most of them are used to adapt to mental world. In terms of median value modals, writers of both Education and Engineering articles adopt them mainly to adapt to social world. And high value modal verbs are used more frequently to adapt to mental world in Education than in Engineering. In adapting to physical world, there is little difference in a certain modal value between the two disciplines. From the analysis, it can be concluded that writers of RA Introductions would select proper modal verbs to adapt to mental world, social world and physical world according to different purposes so as to realize contextual adaptability.The thesis aims to provide some enlightments and implications for language teachers and learners: in the process of both teaching and learning modal verbs, in addition to considering the semantic differences between modal verbs, it is necessary to understand the meaning of each modal verb in discourse and its discourse function in various texts. Only in this way can modal verbs be used appropriately in different genres. |
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