The ‘dialectics of change’ as a facet of globalisation: Epistemic modality in academic writing

This paper uses a section-coded corpus of research articles written in English byscholars from two cultural contexts (North American-based and Spanish-based) andarticles written in Spanish by Spanish scholars to conduct an intercultural andinterlinguistic comparison of epistemic lexical verbs as rhetorical mechanisms thathelp writers convey varying degrees of commitment towards new knowledge claims.Adhering to Giddens’s postulates (1990) on the ‘dialectics of change’ produced byglobalisation, results indicate that the expression of epistemic modality in the textswritten in English by the Spanish scholars instantiates such dialectics. This can beseen by the fact that the texts tend to display a hybrid discourse in which textualfeatures of academic Spanish seep into the scholars’ use of normative academicEnglish.