Epistemic modality in scientific research articles on coronavirus / Nur Azwin Zulkarnain

Nur Azwin , Zulkarnain (2024) Epistemic modality in scientific research articles on coronavirus / Nur Azwin Zulkarnain. PhD thesis, Universiti Malaya.

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Abstract

The recent COVID-19 created many uncertainties due to its novel and lethal nature, particularly during its early detection. The coronavirus has been a concern for many years (Farhud et al., 2021) but the various uncertainties associated with it often complicated things for scientists to arrest the disease (Orso et al., 2020). The study examined the semantic manifestation of epistemic modality as a way for scientific authors to display their levels of certainty in research. Specifically, it probed into the relationship between the semantics of epistemic modality and scientific authors’ levels of certainty in their judgement and knowledge in communicating research findings related to coronavirus. A series of analyses were conducted on a COVID-19 corpus that consisted of scientific research articles pertaining to both the recent COVID-19 as well as historical coronaviruses, amounting to more than 200 million words, retrieved from Sketch Engine. Word frequency, concordance lines, collocations were employed to identify how epistemic modality markers were used based on the epistemic modal expressions suggested by Perkins (1983). The findings were further explained using De Waard and Maat’s (2012) Taxonomy of Epistemic Evaluation, Chepurnaya’s (2019) Typology of Epistemic Responsibility, Dong et al.’s (2020) Coronavirus Research Themes, and Millan’s (2008) Epistemic Strategies. The analyses reveal that scientific authors portrayed absolute certainty in communicating coronavirus-related information to readers by utilising the highest level of epistemic modality, especially in conveying information related to pathogenesis (i.e., the development of the disease) and therapeutics (i.e., the establishment of reliable drugs and treatments). This type of certainty was primarily expressed using epistemic adverbs and lexical verbs instead of the standard modal auxiliaries. The high level of certainty in asserting propositions was also closely related to the availability of evidence which they used to support their claims. Contrastingly, lower levels of certainty portrayed by scientific authors are mainly concerned with research on viral genomics. This portrayal is often found to be realised via modal auxiliaries, which denotes the intention of these experts to mask obvious signs of uncertainties as such epistemic tool is commonly associated with some ambiguity and causes difficulties in interpretation (Nemickienė, 2015). Nonetheless, the many different ways of expressing certainty by these epistemic strategies also result in various semantic functions that can be comprehended in which they are found to be highly influenced by context. Thus, in spite of the uncertainties that characterised much of early stages of coronavirus outbreaks, scientific authors carefully presented themselves as knowledgeable and confident experts in the field, possibly out of the need to calm the public as well as provide actual solutions. By conducting this research, it shed light on the utility of epistemic modality by scientific authors and how it assisted the presentation of information on coronavirus in research articles as a means to improve crisis communication during outbreaks.

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