Saturday, September 24, 2011

Modality and attitude. Author function.

Modality has come to mean a variety of different things in different academic and cultural domains. In linguistics it is the cover terms for the ways that are available to a speaker within a language for expressing opinion or attitude. In particular, modality denotes the linguistic means available for qualifying any claim or commitment you make in language. Following systematic linguistics(as set out in Haliday, 1994), I shall focus on four parameters, in particular, in respect of which a speaker's utterances can be qualified: qualifications of probability, obligation, willingness, or usuality. Most of the utterances we make can be qualified in terms of strength or weakness of the probability, obligation, willingness, or usuality, with which we stand by them. Take the case of someone speaking about a new person in their life, with whom they are becoming romantically involved. If he says: "She certainly is an interesting person" he has included probability modality using the word "certainly"; if he adds "I need to think of some really fun activity to invite her to" he is using obligation modality by using "need to"; I wonder, if she'd like to go ice skating is willingness modality(here, attributed to the other party, not the speaker) I rarely meet people I feel this good about, where "rarely" carries usuality modality