Having in mind all the more intensified exchange in the world of business at global level, as well as in international working settings, it is beyond dispute that foreign language proficiency is necessary in today’s world of economy and management. At the same time, in order to present new insights in the field of management, an expert or a researcher has also to have evaluative linguistic resources at his/her disposal. The paper investigates most frequent modal means appearing in the articles dealing with the issues of management. The corpus-based approach is positioned within the appraisal theory, basically corresponding to the concept of evaluation defined by Hunston and Thompson (2000: 5) as “a broad cover term for the expression of the writer’s attitude or stance towards, viewpoint on, or feelings about entities or propositions that he or she is talking about”. The corpus consists of 5 recent articles in economic, i.e. business domain, Management articles of the year, available at www.cmilibrary.managers.org.uk. It has been processed in order to identify evaluative linguistic resources at writer’s or speaker’s disposal when he/she wants to express his/her opinions and attitudes, to suppose and anticipate, get into socially and culturally acceptable interaction with the addressee, as well as to influence the addressee’s subsequent conduct. The basic finding refers to the most frequent evaluative means identified in the corpus being the modal verbs (can, could, may, might, will, would, should), as well as verbs need, seem, argue, claim, appear, believe, think, tend to, suggest, the phrases be likely/unlikely, be supposed to, be bound to, as well as modal adverbs perhaps, presumably, probably, possibly… The paper also offers an outline of poly-functional potential of the identifi ed English modal means used at pragmatic level either deontically or epistemically.
