Abstract
The language investigated here comprises commentaries to a television documentary series about wildlife. We explore debates about the implications of evolutionary theory for accounts of animals’ behaviour, and the challenge facing broadcasters seeking to explain this to a general audience. Our analysis, which was supported by concordancing software, focuses specifically on deontic and dynamic modal constructions. We identify four kinds of ‘obligation’ to which the non-human creatures featured in these texts are represented as being subject. We suggest that the modal system of English is implicated in the inevitable tendency in these broadcasts towards both anthropomorphic and teleological explanations of animals’ behaviour. We conclude that applied linguists have a contribution to offer as broadcasters make decisions about such linguistic choices.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 19-37 |
| Number of pages | 19 |
| Journal | International Journal of Applied Linguistics |
| Volume | 24 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| Early online date | 15 Jan 2013 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 1 Mar 2014 |
Keywords
- corpus linguistics
- discourse analysis
- language & ecology
- language and the media
- modal verbs