Modal verbs in Brunei English online discourse: a corpus-pragmatic analysis of the Reddit Serious Discussion sub-corpus of CoBE

Modal verbs express epistemic stance, obligation, and dynamic meaning, making them a key resource for investigating variation across World Englishes. Yet modal pragmatics in Brunei English remains unexplored. This study offers the first detailed account, drawing on the Reddit Serious Discussion sub-corpus of the Corpus of Brunei English (CoBE), comprising 771,376 tokens across 323 documents. Frequency and collocational analysis are combined with qualitative pragmatic coding of 240 concordance tokens across eleven sub-categories. Epistemic modality dominates (57.9%), followed by dynamic (25.8%) and deontic modality (16.2%), with individual modals showing near-categorical pragmatic profiles. Four features characterise this register: a division of deontic labour between must and should, an upward deontic trajectory from citizens to government, modal-based concession markers, and the survival of shall exclusively through intertextual borrowing from legal discourse. Brunei English in online deliberative discourse thus draws on a constrained modal repertoire to signal epistemic caution and articulate citizen-to-state authority.