فاطمه نعمتی

Recent years have seen considerable growth in the area of writer-reader interaction in academic writing. Modality devices, especially modal and semi-modal verbs play a significant role in this interaction. Most previous studies concentrated on the overall frequency of the variants of modality, leaving little knowledge about the distinction between Iranian writers and their international professional counterparts in their use of these devices in different sections of their scholarly articles. The purpose of this study was to investigate the frequency, the types, and functions of modal and semi-modal verbs in high quality articles by Iranian and native English writers. To this end, 300 scholarly articles (150 articles written by native English and 150 by Iranian writers) published in reliable journals were randomly selected. TagAnt POS tagger (v1.1.2) was used to tag the corpora for their parts of speech and Antconc (v3.5.9) was used for the frequency and concordance lines and functions of the various types of the modal auxiliary verbs and semi-modal verbs. The results illustrated that native writers of English made greater use of both modal auxiliaries and semi-modal verbs in the three sections of the research articles (result, discussion, and conclusion). In terms of the functions of modal auxiliary verbs, the ‘possibility’ function conveyed by ‘can’ was the most frequent in both Iranian and native English corpora. The findings of this study may contribute to Iranian authors' understanding of how to use different modal and semi-modal verbs properly in each section of their research papers.