Abstract

Over the last few years the interest of scholars working in the field of academic discourse has been directed towards language variation, and academic writing is no longer considered as a consistent and homogeneous form of discourse. The importance traditionally given to the consensual and static aspects of disciplinary communication has been coupled with the emphasis placed upon the analysis not only of interactions, practices and activities typical of various discourse communities, but also new terminologies and instances of interdiscursivity in genres as the results of the development of new communication media. The findings of the linguistic analysis conducted on the variation in the use of epistemic modality markers in the online research articles included in the corpus can be used to understand the socio-cultural implications of the virtual encounters of local and global practices and perspectives.