Original scientific paper
https://doi.org/10.51558/2303-4858.2025.13.2.94
Modal verbs in London’s climate change reports
Oleksandr Kapranov
orcid.org/0000-0002-9056-3311
; NLA University College, Oslo, Norway
*
* Corresponding author.
Abstract
Given that London is exposed to the negative consequences of climate change, the Greater London Authority (GLA) has au-thored a number of climate change reports. However, little is known about linguistic and discursive means that characterise the GLA’s climate change reports. Attempting to bridge the present gap, this paper looks into the frequency and pragmatic use of the central modal verbs (for instance, “can,” “could,” “may,” “might,” etc.) in a corpus of the GLA’s climate change reports that are available to the public at large. By means of using a mix of quantitative and qualitative methodology, the paper shows that the central modal verbs “will,” “can,” and “should” are the most frequently occurring modals in the cor-pus, in which they play a range of pragmatic roles that are further analysed in the paper.
Keywords
climate change discourse; climate change reports; the Greater London Authority; modal verbs
Hrčak ID:
343773
URI
Publication date:
25.1.2026.
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