Modal force – modal quality
A contribution to the corpus-supported analysis of linguistic modality
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.18349/MagyarNyelv.2023.1.35Keywords:
epistemic modality, discourse analysis, corpus linguistics, common groundAbstract
Epistemic modality is mostly treated in linguistics as a word or sentence semantic category. In the present study, this category is presented at the level of the text or discourse. By means of a quantitative study on a large text corpus, it is shown that the expressions of epistemic modality are combined within the text according to certain conventional patterns and together constitute the epistemic background. The speaker thereby positions both himself and his discourse partners. The possible epistemic backgrounds are described within the framework of common-ground theory. At the end, a German-Hungarian comparative analysis is presented in which interesting differences in the communicative strategies of the German and Hungarian discourse participants are brought to light.
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