What do Verbs Say about what we Consider as Research?’

Study of Verbal Modalization in Research Articles Related to Language

Abstract

Conceptions about what research is can be multiple and diverse according to the disciplines in which different practices and discourses are inscribed. In our study, we ask ourselves about what is conceived as research in a corpus of 1,260 articles in Spanish related to the subject of language. These articles were published over a period of 16 years (2002 to 2018) in specialized Latin American journals of social sciences and humanities taken from the SciELO citation index. Adopting a corpus-driven approach in corpus linguistics, in this article we seek to account for the use and discursive functioning of frequently used verbal forms, particularly the verbal mood, the third person, and the construction of passive forms. This approach is based on the use of two computer programs for automated data processing (Iramuteq and Lexico 5) and on the analysis of the modalization present in the verbs used. From the analysis, it was possible to establish that, in the articles, the forms of verbal modalization tend to elaborate an idea of expertise from the configuration of a widely depersonalized demonstration rhetoric, whose purpose is to objectify what is stated. This would point out that, in the speech genre “article”, a conception of research would be related to two issues: on the one hand, the need to objectify, linked to the act of demonstrating, evidencing and presenting results and reflections in a depersonalized way, and on the other, how this depersonalization creates an effect of veracity that seeks to persuade a supposedly expert discursive community.