Rocking the English modals: Investigating linguistic modality in industrial rock lyrics

Abstract

When a speaker creates an utterance, they pick between several linguistic devices to convey their attitudes, although, according to Collins, the modal auxiliaries are the primary way of expressing modality in English1. Numerous scholars have investigated modality in poetry, short stories, or novels2, yet relatively few have inspected modality within song lyrics. This study explores the use of modal verbs and modality types in industrial rock lyrics through a corpus-based analysis, employing Palmer’s3 classification of modality into epistemic, deontic, and dynamic types. Lyrics from popular albums by Ministry, Marilyn Manson, Skinny Puppy, and KMFDM, as well as a detailed case study of Nine Inch Nails, were analysed.
The findings highlight the dominance of can and will and the underrepresentation of epistemic modality across the corpus. Dynamic modality emerged as the most frequent type, followed by deontic modality. Additionally, the analysis challenges Palmer’s findings, which claim that deontic modals usually do not appear paired with pronouns I or we serving as a subject4. The study contributes to linguistic research on modality in underexplored genres, offering insights into linguistic modality in musical lyricism.