Modal Verbs for the Advice Move in Advice Columns

Modal Verbs for the Advice Move in Advice Columns∗∗∗∗ Ying-shu Liao a and Ting-gen Liao b aDepartment of English, National Chengchi University, No. 64, Sec. 2, ZhiNan Rd., Wensgan District, Taipei City, 11605, Taiwan (R.O.C.) 96551505@nccu.edu.tw bDepartment of Industrial Education and Technology, National Changhua University of Education, No.1, Jin-De Road, Changhua City, Taiwan (R.O.C.) gen0620@yahoo.com.tw Abstract. The present study investigates how advice writers employ move sequences and modal verbs to achieve intended discourse functions. This paper aims to testify two research hypotheses: 1. Advice writers of different topics employ different moves and modal verbs to achieve discourse function, and 2. The differences may imply writers’ intentions, emotion and expectancy of effects on the readers to interpret. The corpus of five advice columns for investigation is collected from the website Creators.com. Locher’s (2006) ten moves for advice columns and Leech (2005)’s proposal of discourse function of modals are the frameworks for data analysis. The results indicate four frequent moves: advice, assessment, explanation, and general information. In addition, the columnists use different modal verbs in dealing with different issues. This study has shed light on language learning about the discourse function realized by moves and modals. Keywords: advice column, discourse function, moves, modal verbs. 1 Introduction Giving advice has been recognized as a common discourse function. Advice givers express their opinion to influence addresses’ behaviors or decisions. According to Morrow (2006), to achieve discourse function, advice-givers have employed strategies in various contexts to make advice acceptable. Previous research has focused on oral discourse, including clinical interaction (Heritage and Sefi, 1992), radio call-in programs (Green and Kupferberg, 2000), or daily interaction (Jefferson and Lee, 1992). However, the written discourse has been less discussed. For the written discourse, advice columns in magazines have been the major concern. The research has focused on underlying social norms or values (Currie, 2001; Mutongi, 2000; Stoll, 1998) or linguistic strategies (Thibault, 1988). Though the research has provided insights for psychology and sociology, van Dijk (1997) stated that the study was not suitable for linguistics. The reason was that different writers might view the world differently and appeal to different readers. Thus in linguistics, underlying social norms/values is not the major focus but complex structures, interaction, social practices, the functions in context, society, and culture. Furthermore, there are few studies on the strategies employed by different columnists for different issues. This present study would investigate use of modal verbs as one linguistic strategy applied by different columnists. The reason for this focus was that language users ∗ Acknowledgments. We would like to deliver sincere gratitude to the instructor (Prof. Siaw-Fong Chung) and the classmates (Jeremy, Joy, Jonathon, Dean, Rachel, & Mandy) in the course of Quantitative Research Methods in Language Studies. Without their insightful opinions, this would be an unfulfilled project. Copyright 2009 by Ying-shu Liao and Ting-gen Liao 307 23rd Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation, pages 307–316 could usually deliver information more than the literal meaning of modals. Modals have varieties of communicative functions. Since …

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