MODALITY IN NEWS DISCOURSE ON NATURAL DISASTERS: A STUDY OF THE UNITED KINGDOM PRESS

By Phan Tuan Ly, Hoang Ngoc Thanh Truc, Kieu Minh Khanh
DOI: 10.37550/tdmu.EJS/2026.01.693

This article investigates modality in UK news discourse on natural disasters, drawing on a corpus of 50 disaster-related news reports collected from five UK online newspapers. The corpus comprises 23,804 words, with an average length of 476 words per report. Methodologically, the study adopts a mixed-methods design, integrating qualitative descriptive analysis to identify, categorize, and interpret modal expressions in context with quantitative analysis to determine the frequency and distribution of modal resources across the corpus. All texts were annotated and statistically processed using UAM CorpusTool 6.2. The findings reveal that, out of 386 modal tokens, verbal modality overwhelmingly predominates (328 tokens; 85%), while nonverbal modality is comparatively limited (15%), suggesting hard-news reporting favors more determinate, less overtly subjective forms. Modal auxiliaries are the primary resource, led by will (70), can (50), could (43), and would (36). Adjectival modality is diverse but less frequent overall (28 items), with likely (12) most common, followed by possible (9) and unable/sure (7 each). Adverbial modality is rare, with only definitely (2) and maybe/possibly/perhaps (1 each). This paper advances applied linguistics theory and offers practical insights for improving journalistic communication in Vietnam.