Lexical and Grammatical Modality in Climate Journalism: A Comparative Corpus-assisted Analysis of Intentionality in the Times of India and the Los Angeles Times

This paper will discuss the role of lexical and grammatical modality in the materialization of intentionality in climate-related feature journalism in the Los Angeles Times and The Times of India. Although modality has received extensive research as a category of semantics, comparatively little research has examined the role of modality in the creation of journalistic intentionality under media conditions. To fill this gap, 20 feature articles were studied using a mixed-methods corpus-assisted discourse analysis. In the analysis, 85 lexical modal markers and 81 grammatical markers were found in the corpus. The result shows that The Times of India is more dependent on epistemic modal verbs (e.g., may and could (using 50 percent of modal use) and passive forms (15 examples), which is more characteristic of a conservative and fact-oriented news coverage. On the contrary, the Los Angeles Times is more deontic in the use of modals (must, should), evaluative adverbs (nine instances versus three in TOI), conditional clauses (14 cases), and in expressing urgency and directives. These results prove that modality is not a linguistic category but a strategic rhetorical tool associated with institutional and cultural position. The research makes an important contribution to the field of media discourse studies, particularly in the explanation of the concept of modality as an indicator of intentional stance from a comparative corpus approach, which could be applied in the study of the influence of news media on persuasion, authority, and the population’s involvement in climate communication.