Modality in Sustainability Discourse by Harrods and Liberty: Analysing British Cultural Icons’ Discursive Practices

Abstract

The article presents and discusses a mixed-method study whose aim is to find out how Harrods and Liberty, two luxury department stores in London (the United Kingdom) that are referred to as British cultural icons (visitbritain.com 2023), use modality that is expressed by modal verbs (e.g., can) in their discourse on sustainability. Methodologically, the study is based upon the literature (Aiezza 2015; Bu et al. 2020; Garzone & Catenaccio 2022; Kranich & Bicsar 2012), which argues that modal verbs play a number of important pragmatic roles in corporate discourse. Following the literature, it is hypothesised in the study that modal verbs in sustainability discourses by Harrods and Liberty are employed in a pragmatically similar manner. In order to verify the hypothesis, a corpus of Harrods’ and Liberty’s sustainability discourses is collected and analysed quantitatively in the computer program AntConc (Anthony 2022) to compute the frequency of the occurrence of modal verbs. Thereafter, the most frequent modal verbs in the corpus are examined qualitatively to establish their pragmatic roles in Harrods’ and Liberty’s sustainability discourses. The findings indicate that these discourses make use of the modal verbs will and can as boosters that contribute to a positive corporate image-building.