The Disciplined Scholar: Deontic Modality in Editors’ Instructions to Contributors

Even in the face of bitter controversy, scientific discourse is remarkable for its lack of assertiveness and imposition. The academic genre system, however, exhibits at least one type of directive, normative text whose essential purpose is to lay down rules of authorial conduct for the research community: the Instructions to Contributors printed inside the cover of most scholarly journals. This paper looks a corpus of 50 such texts from UK/US-based academic journals, in an attempt to account for their use of the deontic function, interpreted as a "conceptual domain" rather than a grammatical category. Within the same genre, the samples considered display an interesting range and variety of realisations, which suggest different evaluations of pragmatic appropriacy and interpersonal meaning.