Expresiones de obligación y función directiva en editoriales de revistas científicas

Abstract

This paper aims at distinguishing between obligation expressions with prescriptive functions (recommendations and suggestions) and obligation expressions with a different function. We focus on deontic modality expressions in a corpus of three scientific journals of Argentina, drawing on studies of languages for specific purposes, and linguistic analysis of rhetorical and illocutionary patterns. We examine illocutionary patterns of rhetorical moves in which those expressions appear. We observed two types of directives: prescriptive ones, which propose activities to the audience, and metadiscursive directives, which aim at highlighting relevant information. These two directives present several differences, especially, in the illocutionary structure. Prescriptive directives constitute the main illocution in the illocutionary pattern, while metadiscursive directives constitute a supportive function. The analysis of illocutionary structure may be set as a criteria for establishing distinctions.