Lexical Expressions of Possibility in Specialized Discourse: a Corpus-based Analysis

Accordingly, the aim of the present article is to discuss the use of possibility (one of the values included within modality) in specialized discourse by resorting to a corpus of research articles compiled from several journals devoted to the field of Engineering. This corpus of written texts, which is a sizeable sample of more than three million words, will allow us to analyse how several lexical devices (that is, nominal, adjectival, adverbial and verbal) other than modal verbs are used to express possibility. The frequency of these expressions in the abstracts and the articles themselves will be also examined, highlighting any possible difference observed between them.