The Category of Modality. Cognitive Approach. The Psycho/Neurolinguistic Substrate

Abstract

In traditional sense, in the act of communication, the modality category marks the position of the speaker in relation to himself, the listener and the emitted content, constituting a complex set of interdependent relationships between the speaker (transmitter) and the listener (receiver), which might endanger the message-code relationship in human communication. The material investigated in the present approach allows the possibility to distinguish the attitude of the speaker, perceived as a reaction to external stimuli, thus gaining both rational and irrational support, able to reveal some latent processes of consciousness. The reported ones, both psycho-linguistically and socially, mentally or emotionally, allow the possibility to outline an integral image of the speaking subject, manifesting one’s own vision upon a certain situation, from the perspective of the individual – ontic realities – reasoning – reaction. The modality, a distinctive mark within the structure of a statement, is endowed with a purely subjective imputation, a decisive fact for an extensive investigation of the phenomenon in question, a position fully adopted in the present article. The conceptual ambiguity of the modality continues to generate various interpretations and dissensions in the content-expression context, and, as a whole, regarding the language-speech or language-thinking dichotomies. Representing one of the linguistic universals, the mentioned category is circumscribed to multiple fields related to cognitivism, namely: logic, philosophy of language, psychology, having tangents with psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics, which, in modern linguistics, imposes new directions of investigation of those factors involved in the communication process.