Deontic Modality Research Articles

Communicative Space of Language Personality in Modern American Channelings

Palmer (1979) starts from the linguistic reality that deontic modals do not have past forms, because it is impossible to impose an obligation or give permission to someone in the past, although it is possible to report an obligation or permission that existed in the past, and this can be seen through the above examples. In summary, both in the examples of the sports corpus in Serbian and in the examples in English, the most dominant is the use of deontic markers that have the meaning of obligation, ie. bonds. Deontic modals are mostly directives, as shown here, when we oblige others to do something. In short, in the examples of corpora in Serbian and English, the most common is the use of deontic statements that have the meaning of obligation, ie. bonds. Even more, in this paper it turned out that in English it is more common, when we look at the frequency of use of deontic markers with the meaning of obligation. The bond can be strong and weak. We came to the conclusion that a strong bond in most cases comes from coaches (T), as people who have experience, security and long work behind them, unlike players who feel a weaker bond. Approaching this paper from a multidisciplinary perspective in the analysis of modality and speech acts, a conclusion arises that such research recognises the complex relationship between language and society. The study places at the forefront the linguistic category of modality as a linguistic mechanism of social action through which individuals can maintain their identities and viewpoints while keeping the ability to affect the thinking, opinions, and identities of other members involved in the interaction. From the syntax-semantics interface, we identified deontic markers and provided explanations for deontic modality, which many linguists view as a subtype of epistemic modality, yet it is still a topic that opens the doors to additional research. From the perspective of pragmatics, the examples lead to the conclusion that the insight into immediate context is necessary for a proper understanding of speech acts and unspoken messages, and that participants in communication share common world knowledge and experience. Nonetheless, people naturally almost unmistakably recognise the pragmatic meanings of speech acts within a speech event, where a speech event entails a set of all statements understood by the interlocutors in a given situation aimed at achieving a specific goal. In addition, we also concluded that the illocutionary force depends on the speaker who performs the speech act with a clear intention of having its meaning unequivocally recognised. What is more, certain circumstances and conditions need to exist for the speech act to take place. Nevertheless, the topic poses itself as deeply complex and raises numerous other questions concerning further research. The importance of analysing modality goes beyond the traditional framework of linguistic study and primarily manifests itself on the level of linguistic use of modal operators in an appropriate linguistic and socio-cultural context, thus within the domain of pragmatics, sociolinguistics, and discourse analysis.

Ethos Presidencial de Autoridade: Análise da Modalidade Deôntica nos Discursos de Tomada de Posse do Estado Novo

Under the scope of Discourse Analysis, this article analyses the construction of an authority presidential ethos (Amossy, 2010; Maingueneau, 1999) of the President of the Republic in 6 presidential inaugural addresses given during the Estado Novo. This study uses a qualitative approach to focus on the deontic modality (linguistic categories, obligation source, target and object) and its analysis falls into two headings: a) the President’s duties and b) the People’s duties. We have concluded that distinct and multiple images of authority (that serve Estado Novo’s political and ideological agenda) are built of and/or by the President.

WYRAŻANIE MODALNOŚCI DEONTYCZNEJ: NAKAZ W PRAWIE MIĘDZYNARODOWYM ROSYJSKIM I UKRAIŃSKIM

The aim of this paper is to compare the Russian and Ukrainian clauses conveying deontic modality of obligation in international law. The investigation was carried out on parallel texts of Agreement, Treaty and Memorandum of Understanding drawn up by the Ukraine and the Russian Federation in the post-Soviet era. This systematic comparison deals with both modal auxiliaries and several periphrastic constructions. The study findings show that the two languages have very different constructions for conveying this deontic value, with Ukrainian legal language using a more varied range of lexico-semantic and morphosyntactic units. Divergence occurs in the use of the modal constructions with the verbs musyty and maty and the synthetic future form, which is not available in Russian.

ANALIZA LINGWISTYCZNA SIŁY KONIECZNOŚCI W KONTEKŚCIE PRAWNYM W JĘZYKU FIŃSKIM I POLSKIM

The aim of this article is to highlight an issue of expressing deontic modality in Finnish and Polish in a legal context in terms of deontic strength. The particular interest is put on the Finnish necessive expression on –t(t)ava and its Polish equivalents. The choice of this expression is motivated by the fact that it is the most frequent deontic expression that occurred in the analysed material. It is argued that although the meaning of the Finnish and English modal expressions are almost parallel, the corresponding Polish expressions show some discrepancy. This paper aims at giving insight into the differences of the phenomenon on the basis of the Treaty on Functioning of the European Union.

From Universal Perceptions to Diverging Behaviors: An Exploratory Comparison ofResponses to Unreasonable Accusations among People from the United States, Japan, and South Korea

From Universal Perceptions to Diverging Behaviors: An Exploratory Comparison ofResponses to Unreasonable Accusations among People from the United States, Japan, and South Korea Sachiko KIYAMA, Yuki TAKATORI, Hyunjung LIM ; Katsuo TAMAOKA Abstract The combined application of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) principles in some modern studies has gone beyond the boundaries of fictional discourse / text. It has witnessed an increasing interest in real-life discourse /text such as newspapers / magazines articles, court verdicts, and presidential and/or political speeches. This new linguistic-discursive trend is substantiated by the fact that the real-life and non-fictional texts/discourses are often ideologically loaded. Therefore, analyzing such speeches would enable to scrutinize, unearth, and reveal their hidden ideologies. It is against this backdrop that this article aims at shedding the SFL projectors’ light on the Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari’s inaugural speech, by adopting CDA theory as the backbone. The analysis focuses on mood, epistemic and deontic modality choices, as well as recoverable references through personal pronouns used throughout the political discourse under consideration. The study has demonstrated how political leaders' discourses unearth a sort of harmony with ideologies that tally and commensurate the domestic, sub-regional and international realities. Furthermore, it provides sufficient evidence that the grammar of speech is not merely a combinational tool of creating correct constructions, but a method of structuring information and transferring ideology. Full Text: PDF DOI: 10.15640/ijlc.v4n1a3

The Cognitive Modelling of Textual Modality

The article is devoted to the cognitive modelling of modality on the basis of information-content structure of the English short story text. The cognitive, modal and textual functions interaction may be represented as the hierarchical systerm of textual modality hyperframe, which comprises as essential parts frames of referential and subjective modalities. In its turn, the referential modality frame as the basic layer of the text content embraces the scenes and scenarios of subject, action/state, object, temporality and locality. The subjective modality frame is subdivided into subjective–personal (author – text) and subjective–interpersonal (author – recipient) modalities. Correspondingly, the former consists of the scenes of sensor, emotive (psychic reaction), mental, evaluative and compositional modalities; the latter implies the epistemic, axiological and deontic modalities. The provided textual analysis reveals the interaction of language units of different levels (phonetic, lexical, grammatical, syntactical), activating frames of referential and subjective modalities.

Analyzing Interpersonal Metafunction through Mood and Modality in Kaine Agary’s Yellow-Yellow from Critical Discourse and Womanist Perspective

<p>The aim of this paper is to analyze mood, epistemic and deontic modality patterns in an extract culled from <em>Yellow-Yellow</em> (2006) by one of the Nigerian new millennium female writer, Kaine Agary. The findings data revealed by the interpersonal meaning analysis are discussed against the backdrop of critical discourse analysis and womanist theory. The discussion contended that, despite the blend of monologic and dialogic organization of the novel, Kaine Agary has tried to portray the sociological schisms making up the daily life of young girls in the oil-resourced region of Nigeria. More importantly, the authoress has shown women’s determination and commitment to support Zilayefa to succeed in achieving good results in education while the major male character goes against this developmental stream flow by impregnating her. The mood and modality choices operated show some kind of power and hierarchy relations and conflicting ideologies between Sisi, Lolo, Zilayefa and Admiral. The discursive interpretation eventually found out that the interpersonal meaning description and critical discussion can properly work together towards achieving consensus. It is agreed that the hidden authorial ideology behind Kaine Agary’s fictional text is geared towards a pro-women social change for a more balanced African society. This is, of course, the gist priorities and great topical issues calling for urgent response at this time.</p>

Análise enunciativa das marcas modais presentes em corpus de interpretação simultânea de libras-português.

http://dx.doi.org/10.5007/2175-7968.2015v35nesp2p289Este texto centra-se nas questões do trabalho do Intérprete de Língua de Sinais na condição de segundo enunciador da produção discursiva. Esses profissionais, no momento da interpretação, buscam recriar [atualizar] os conceitos emanados da língua fonte para a língua alvo, instaurando, assim, uma segunda instância enunciativa. O quadro teórico mobilizado situa-se na perspectiva da Linguística Enunciativa (BENVENISTE, 1989; FLORES, 2008, 2009a, 2009b, 2010) e no estudo dos modais em línguas orais e na LIBRAS. Tem-se, por objetivos, buscar as marcas deixadas pelo segundo sujeito enunciador do texto, neste caso, o intérprete, quanto ao uso de modais especificamente e analisar as escolhas desse segundo sujeito enunciador por utilizar um ou outro tipo de modal (no texto alvo), que esteja explícito ou implícito na primeira situação de enunciação (no texto fonte). Para análise, a fala de uma pessoa surda, com tempo total de 40' (quarenta minutos), que estava sendo interpretada para o Português oral, foi transcrita. Após a transcrição, 6 (seis) excertos da fala total, com ocorrências de modais na língua fonte ou alvo, foram analisados. Em função das análises empreendidas, pontua-se: 1. a tendência de que a modalidade deôntica seja quase sempre interpretada como na língua fonte; 2. as escolhas interpretativas são sempre guiadas por pistas enunciativas deixadas na fala do primeiro enunciador, para as quais o intérprete deve revelar domínio de aspectos pertinentes tanto à língua fonte quanto à língua alvo; 3. na ausência de marcas modais explícitas, os intérpretes são sensíveis às noções modais extravasadas por toda a superfície textual; 4. a omissão temporal na interpretação de modais epistêmicos de grande valor de aderência podendo funcionar como uma estratégia interpretativa e não como um falseamento da informação original; 5. a noção de “tempo de checagem”, sendo proposta para recobrir o tempo (não cronológico) no qual o intérprete, após receber a informação da língua fonte, realizasua interpretação.

A Corpus-based Study on Evaluation Adjectives in Academic English

As proposed by Biber et al. (1999: 966, 972), stance requires the communication of assessments and value judgments concerning the described situation by appeal to evidence (evidentiality), assessment of the degree of likelihood concerning the described situation (epistemic modality), and the arguments regarding the necessity or desirability of the situation obtaining (deontic modality). The present study investigates authorial stance in doctoral dissertations of native and non-native academic authors of English. It is designed to analyze evaluation adjectives in doctoral dissertations produced in the field of English Language Teaching, Applied Linguistics, English Language and Literature and Modern Languages between 2005 and 2012. Throughout the study, a total number of fifty-one evaluation adjectives were examined across three sets of corpora including dissertations written by native speaking academic authors of English (NAEs), Turkish-speaking academic authors of English (TAEs) and Spanish-speaking academic authors of English (SAEs). The items in question were identified through WS Tools (Scott, 2012) over three corpora, which were subsequently compared with regard to their frequency using a log likelihood test. Findings of the study have revealed that these adjectives were significantly underused by TAEs and SAEs against NAEs. The study offers a couple of possible reasons for this particular consequence and a few instructional suggestions for academic writing in a second language.

OBLIGATION, FREE CHOICE, AND THE LOGIC OF WEAKEST PERMISSIONS

AbstractWe introduce a new understanding of deontic modals that we callobligations as weakest permissions. We argue for its philosophical plausibility, study its expressive power in neighborhood models, provide a complete Hilbert-style axiom system for it and show that it can be extended and applied to practical norms in decision and game theory.

“Getting placed” in time

This study describes one caseworker’s construction of responsibility through her interactions with three homeless clients in an urban homeless shelter, revealing the significant impact of the shelter, shelter policy, and personal contexts on the construction of responsibility in talk. It explores how responsibility is constructed through a series of discursive choices, including deontic modality, personal pronouns, expressions of time and space, and accounts. These discursive choices expose the ways in which the caseworker’s responsibility talk changes depending on the category of client. Specifically, the study compares the caseworker’s responsibility talk with an undocumented homeless client to her responsibility talk with long-term staying clients. Given policy mandates to place long-term clients (in shelter nine months or longer) more quickly, responsibility talk with these clients as they near the nine-month benchmark is more aggressive. The study shows how the caseworker’s talk with the new undocumented client surprisingly resembles her talk with the long-term clients nearing the nine-month benchmark. She discursively treats this new undocumented client like persisting ones. ‘Imagined time’ and ‘imagined space’ are introduced to aid in describing the projected, future non-compliance of a new undocumented client as established in the caseworker’s responsibility talk.

Zur Übersetzung deontischer Modalmarker ins Ukrainische: eine korpusgestützte Untersuchung anhand von EU-Richtlinien

This paper focuses on the expression of deontic modality in contemporary legal-diplomatic Ukrainian. The investigation is carried out on a corpus of Ukrainian translations of a EU directives. The software used to compare data is Antconc 3.2.4w 2011. Special attention is given to Ukrainian synonymic structures with deontic meaning of obligation. Findings confirm a high degree of lexical and morpho-syntactic variability in Ukrainian which increase the complexity of the translation of deontic modal auxiliary verbs. In any case mini-diachronic analysis reveals the stabilization process of two modal constructions: povynen + Infinitive and maty + Infinitive. Approaching this issue will necessarily entail further contrastive studies using parallel corpora.

Modality Markers and Shifting Genre Conventions in Dictionary Definitions

The paper analyses the entries of Oxford Fowler’s Modern English Usage (2004), building up on our previous research on changes in modality of lexicographic discourse. It is argued that its prescriptivist stance has been toned down not only by the preference for genre-specific epistemic modality markers instead of deontic modality markers, but also by employing in definitions a wide scope of common epistemic modality markers related to probability, certainty or uncertainty as regards the validity of the proposition. The prevailing defining vocabulary is now that of opinion or advice. Recommendations on usage also often refer to register variables singled out by systemic-functional linguistics: tenor (degrees of formality signalled by labels like formal, informal, and by pragmatic labels: offensive, affectionate, etc.), field (legal language, marketing, etc.) and marking the type of discourse and mode (spoken – written). Register variables split the notion of Standard English further and qualify prescriptive statements on usage, making them fully valid for a particular register only. Thus, the analysis reveals a broad range of both non-specific and genre-specific low modality markers employed in the texts of dictionary entries as new genre conventions of both content and form. It shows that these conventions are historically relative and that low modality is a new mode of address to dictionary users.

We Are All Ballooning: Multimedia Critical Discourse Analysis of ‘Measure Up’ and ‘Swap It, Don’t Stop It’ Social Marketing Campaigns

We Are All Ballooning: Multimedia Critical Discourse Analysis of ‘Measure Up’ and ‘Swap It, Don’t Stop It’ Social Marketing Campaigns

Modality Expressed By Will And Would In Legal Texts And Their Equivalents In Romanian

Abstract Modality is influenced by different genres and finding the types of modality commonly found in legal texts is the goal of the present paper. Modals are very important because they involve communication about advice, about obligation or permission and they also help us to express our decisions about what we think, about what we know and how strongly we believe that our knowledge is correct. The present study deals with the uses of 'will' and 'would' in legal texts and the comparison with their Romanian counterparts in point of epistemic and deontic modalities.

Two Issues in Korean Negative Imperatives

This paper aims at explaining (i) why negative imperatives are allowed in Korean, as opposed to many Indo-European languages such as Italian, Modern Greek and Spanish; and (ii) why only a specific type of long form negation (LFN), namely mal, is available in Korean negative imperatives. First, we argue with empirical evidence that Korean permits TP in imperatives, a necessary condition for the presence of NegP in Zanuttini’s (1996) cross-linguistic generalization that licensing of NegP is contingent upon the presence of TP. The current view is distinguished from most previous research as the latter simply takes it for granted that Korean is among a group of languages allowing negative imperatives, without seriously considering the issue in the cross-linguistic context. Second, we claim that the reason only NegP headed by LFN mal can appear in Korean negative imperatives is that the NegP of this kind is selected by Jussive Phrase where not only a person feature but also a feature of [+deontic] is encoded. This idea is a reminiscent of Han and Lee (2007) in which they suggest that the deontic feature is specified in ModP in charge of deontic modality. Departing from Han and Lee, however, we do not postulate ModP, but assume Jussive Phrase advanced by Zanuttini, Pak and Portner (2012). Our analysis appealing to ‘the selectional restriction’ can be supported by the fact that LFN mal is not possible in the lower clause of key-ha ’let’ imperatives in Korean, and can be extended to their kin clause types such as exhortatives (cf. Pak et al. (2004)).

Neg-raising and positive polarity: The view from modals

This article shows that the deontic modals must, should and supposed to are all Positive Polarity Items which can raise in order to avoid being in an anti-licensing environment; it also establishes that should has a dual nature, i.e., it is not just a PPI, but it is also a neg-raising predicate, which can achieve wide scope through a homogeneity inference, and that supposed to, also a PPI, exhibits a neg-raising behavior under certain pragmatic conditions which shed new light on the neg-raising phenomenon. http://dx.doi.org/10.3765/sp.8.4 BibTeX info

Saudi Tertiary Level Students’ Cognition of Modal Auxiliaries Expressing Epistemic Possibility in English

The importance of studying modality as a tool that speakers use to convey their attitudes and evaluations is well documented. However, research on learners’ cognition of modality is at its beginning. This paper concentrates on the cognition of possibility in epistemic modal auxiliaries. It relies on what it calls utterance completion test to study the cognition of epistemic modality by 29 Saudi students and by 3 native speakers – one British and two Canadians. The data analysis shows that while the native speakers’ cognition is largely in line with linguists’ descriptions, the Saudi students’ cognition conforms very less to the linguists’ descriptions. It reveals that students tend to confuse epistemic modality with deontic modality, and within epistemic modality itself, they confuse possibility with necessity. Saudi students also have difficulties with past epistemic possibility and they confuse the present perfect with the past proposition residue carried by modals. The study attributes this confusion to L1 transfer and lack of familiarity with some pragmatic aspects related to the target language culture. To help learners develop their cognition of modality, the study recommends that grammar textbooks and grammar teachers focus in the first place on the semantic subtleties of modal auxiliaries, without ignoring the pragmatic dimension that accompanies the utterances in which they occur. The study does not question by any means teaching language in context to develop speaking, listening, writing, and reading skills.

The If P, Ought P Problem

AbstractKratzer semantics for modals and conditionals generates the prediction that sentences of the form if p, ought p are trivially true. As Frank and Zvolenszky show, for certain flavors of modality, like deontic modality, this prediction is false. I explain some conservative solutions to the problem, and then argue that they are inadequate to account for puzzle cases involving self‐frustrating oughts. These cases illustrate a general problem: there are two forms of information‐sensitivity in deontic modals. Even generalizations of Kratzer semantics that predict these two roles for information, e.g. Kolodny and MacFarlane, predict that they vary together. I propose a generalization of Kratzer semantics that allows the two roles for information to vary independently of each other.

Deontic Modals: Why Abandon the Classical Semantics?

AbstractI begin by reviewing classical semantics and the problems presented by normative conflicts. After a brief detour through default logic, I establish some connections between the treatment of conflicts in each of these two approaches, classical and default, and then move on to consider some further issues: priorities among norms, or reasons, conditional oughts, and reasons about reasons.