| 要約: | The recent COVID-19 created many uncertainties due to its novel and lethal nature,
particularly during its early detection. The coronavirus has been a concern for many years
(Farhud et al., 2021) but the various uncertainties associated with it often complicated
things for scientists to arrest the disease (Orso et al., 2020). The study examined the
semantic manifestation of epistemic modality as a way for scientific authors to display
their levels of certainty in research. Specifically, it probed into the relationship between
the semantics of epistemic modality and scientific authors’ levels of certainty in their
judgement and knowledge in communicating research findings related to coronavirus. A
series of analyses were conducted on a COVID-19 corpus that consisted of scientific
research articles pertaining to both the recent COVID-19 as well as historical
coronaviruses, amounting to more than 200 million words, retrieved from Sketch Engine.
Word frequency, concordance lines, collocations were employed to identify how
epistemic modality markers were used based on the epistemic modal expressions
suggested by Perkins (1983). The findings were further explained using De Waard and
Maat’s (2012) Taxonomy of Epistemic Evaluation, Chepurnaya’s (2019) Typology of
Epistemic Responsibility, Dong et al.’s (2020) Coronavirus Research Themes, and
Millan’s (2008) Epistemic Strategies. The analyses reveal that scientific authors
portrayed absolute certainty in communicating coronavirus-related information to readers
by utilising the highest level of epistemic modality, especially in conveying information
related to pathogenesis (i.e., the development of the disease) and therapeutics (i.e., the
establishment of reliable drugs and treatments). This type of certainty was primarily
expressed using epistemic adverbs and lexical verbs instead of the standard modal auxiliaries. The high level of certainty in asserting propositions was also closely related
to the availability of evidence which they used to support their claims. Contrastingly,
lower levels of certainty portrayed by scientific authors are mainly concerned with
research on viral genomics. This portrayal is often found to be realised via modal
auxiliaries, which denotes the intention of these experts to mask obvious signs of
uncertainties as such epistemic tool is commonly associated with some ambiguity and
causes difficulties in interpretation (Nemickienė, 2015). Nonetheless, the many different
ways of expressing certainty by these epistemic strategies also result in various semantic
functions that can be comprehended in which they are found to be highly influenced by
context. Thus, in spite of the uncertainties that characterised much of early stages of
coronavirus outbreaks, scientific authors carefully presented themselves as
knowledgeable and confident experts in the field, possibly out of the need to calm the
public as well as provide actual solutions. By conducting this research, it shed light on
the utility of epistemic modality by scientific authors and how it assisted the presentation
of information on coronavirus in research articles as a means to improve crisis
communication during outbreaks.
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