Modal verbs in London’s climate change reports

Abstract

Given that London is exposed to the negative consequences of climate change, the Greater London Authority (GLA) has authored a number of climate change reports. However, little is known about linguistic and discursive means that characterise the GLA’s climate change reports. Attempting to bridge the present gap, this paper looks into the frequency and pragmatic use of the central modal verbs (for instance, “can,” “could,” “may,” “might,” etc.) in a corpus of the GLA’s climate change reports that are available to the public at large. By means of using a mix of quantitative and qualitative methodology, the paper shows that the central modal verbs “will,” “can,” and “should” are the most frequently occurring modals in the corpus, in which they play a range of pragmatic roles that are further analysed in the paper.