Attitudinal pseudo-clauses in discourse

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Attitudinal pseudo-clauses in discourse

Valery Mykhaylenko (Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine)

МИХАЙЛЕНКО Валерій. ПСЕВДОРЕЧЕННЯ АВТОРСЬКОГО ВІДНОШЕННЯ У ДИСКУРСІ

У роботі розглядаються проблеми зниження ймовірності мовця в дискурсі та розкриття його засобів вираження. Дослідження об'єктивних висловлювань у різних регістрах дискурсу з використанням лінгвістичної категорії модальності дає змогу вирізнити кореляцію хеджування та типу модальності, що потрактована як аспект міжособистісної метафункції мовної компетентності (Aumuller, 2014). Термін "модальність" поділяє цілий ряд понять у галузях філософії, морфології, синтаксису, семантики та аналізу дискурсу. Дослідження модальності як міжособистісної метафункції в системній функціональній лінгвістиці в літературі головним чином зосереджувались на варіантах жанрів та / або дискурсу, а саме; консервативний, юридичний, медіа, літературний, академічний, політичний та медичний, а також в живання сучасне англійської мови (Jespersen, 1924). Дана стаття продовжує авторську серію про хеджування в дискурсі (MMykhaylenko, 2017).

Дискурсна стратегія хеджування /зниження не відіграє першорядної ролі в дискурсі: мовець/автор не надає дає можливість слухачеві об'єктивно інтерпретувати його / її інтенаціональне значення, з іншого боку, слухач очікує певної деонтичної складової висловлення з боку мовця. Завдяки кількіснми та якісним методам лінгвістичного дослідження у статті пропонується точка зору згіддно якої, використання модусних псевдовисловлювань виступає відображенням стратегій хеджування/зниження модусного відношення автора, що використовуються мовцями для вирішення різтх умов соціального характеру. У рамках критичного дискурс-аналізу - модальність розуміється набагато ширше ніж функціонуі\вання традиційних модальних дієслів, таких як може, може, може, може бути та повинен (Fowler, 1985). Віоповідно, виступає як ставлення мовця до слухач::, або до у своїй впевненості вербалізованого висловлювання.

Ключові слова: деонтична модальність, вставне речення, міжособистий, понижувач імовірності.

MYKHAYLENKO Valery. ATTITUDINAL PSEUDO-CLAUSES IN DISCOURSE

This paper addresses the challenges of downtoning the speaker's probability in discourse and revealing its means of expression. A study of objective statements in various discourse registers using the linguistic category of modality has potency of investigating the correlation of hedging and the type of modality which is considered to be an aspect of interpersonal metafunction in language competence (Aumuller, 2014). The term “modality" shares a range of concepts within the fields ofphilosophy, morphology, syntax, semantics, and discourse-analysis. Studies on modality as an interpersonal metafunction in Systemic Functional Linguistics have in the literature, mainly focused on variants of genres and/or discourse namely; conservative, legal, media, literary, academic, political and medical discourse as well as the contemporary English usage (Jespersen, 1924). The present paper continues the author's] series on hedging in discourse (Mykhaylenko, 2017). The discourse strategy of hedging/downtoning seems to play a paramount role in discourse: the speaker gives the hearer a possibility to objectively interpret his/her intentional meaning, on the other hand, the hearer expects a definite deontic constituent on the part of the speaker. Based on quantitative and qualitative methods, the article argues that the use of modal expressions can be better explained as reflecting the strategies of hedging used by writers for dealing with the social conditions. Within critical discourse analysis, modality is understood as encompassing much more than simply the occurrence of overt modal auxiliaries such as may, might, can, could, will, would, shall, should, must, and ought (Fowler, 1985). Rather, modality concerns the speaker's attitude toward and/or confidence in the proposition being presented.

Key words: deontic modality, embedded clause, attitudinal, interpersonal, hedge, probability.

PREAMBLE

Based on quantitative and qualitative methods of linguistic research, the article argues that the use of modal expressions can be better explained as reflecting the strategies of hedging used by writers for dealing with the social aspects. Modality concerns the writer's or speaker's attitude toward and/or confidence in the proposition being presented. Carter et al.write that the speakers use hedges when they want to soften the mode of the utterance (Coates, 2008: 238239). In Halliday"s system, modality is primarily located in the interpersonal component of the grammar and choices in this component are independent of grammatical choices in other components. Modality may be expressed through certain types of main verbs,modal verbs, mental expressions as well as through adjectives, adverbs, and certain nominalizations, Fowler provides a brief list to illustrate these categories. Within the critical discourse analysis, modality is understood as encompassing much more than simply the occurrence of overt modal auxiliaries such as may, might, can, could, will, would, shall, should, must, and ought (Coates, 2008: 73). Rather, modality concerns the writer's or speaker's attitude toward and/or confidence in the proposition being presented. Palmer focuses on epistemic and deontic modalities, corresponding roughly to Jesperson's two categories (Mauranen, 1997: 73; Jespersen, 1924/2017: 313) while Palmer reorganizes categories of modality such that the first division is between PROPOSITIONAL MODALITY, on the one hand, encompassing both epistemic and evidential modality, and EVENT MODALITY, on the other hand, encompassing both deontic and dynamic modality. Propositional modality is concerned with the speaker"s attitude to the truth value or factual status of the proposition, while Event modality refers to events which, in Palmerer's opinion, are not actualized, events that have not taken place but are merely potential (Palmer, 2001: 8).

According to the methodology of the given research: we attempted to classify each occurrence of an overt modal according to Fowler's five categories signified in clauses in a range of linguistic forms namely: (1)Modal auxiliary verbs: e.g. may, shall, must, need and others; (ii) Sentence adverbs: such as probably, certainly, regrettably, etc.; (iii) Adjectives such as necessary, unfortunate, certain; (iv) Some verbs and nominalizations are also essentially modal. e.g. permit, prove, obligation, likelihood, desirability, authority etc.

For the purpose of the present study, we shall focus on deontic modality of the pseudo- clauseI + using the linguistic approach. Linguistic studies of modality, as noted by Sulkunnen and Torronen, can be located in a variety of linguistic subdisciplines namely; morphology, syntax, semantics, etc. (Olaniyan, 2015: 45). Morphology describes the lexical forms in which modality is manifested in different languages; syntax describes the complex configurations in which modality may be manifested, and semantics identifies modal meanings and explores the variety of the ways these meanings may be expressed (Lillian, 2008: .2). Hedging is a common feature of scientific communication, the fact is cademic discourse is a world of uncertainties, indirectness, and nonfinality, in brief, a world where it is natural to cultivate hedges (Suikkanen, 2018: 115). The fact is that the speaker of academic discourse tries to underline his/her authorship, see the personal deixis (1-st person singular) and his/her mental verb: I +CONSIDER (TYPE). It is worth stressing that the speaker's pseudo-sentence is overt but his/her attitudinal mode is covert.

THEORETICAL BACKGROUND

First introduced by Lakoff hedges have become a popular object of research. The discourse strategy of hedging or down-toning seems to play a paramount role in academic discourse--on the one hand, when results s/he presents may turn out not to be entirely true or accurate (Stamatovic, 2016: 99). Coates has argued that hedging is used as apart of socio-cognitive processes to fulfill the conversational strategies of politeness, uncertainty, or indirectness (Fowler, 1985: 110) consequently, hedges may refer to the indirectness of events to create a distance between the speaker and their proposition.

A number of studies have suggested that hedging is necessary in several ways it helps indicate approximation when detailed accuracy is not necessary or unexpected (Prince, Bosk, Frader, 1982). Hedging may alsohelp professionals have control over their interlocutors. We argue that “one way professionals indicate their level of expertise they convey in order to make their assertion indisputable (and) irrefutable”, though hedges, as shields, can give “very high degrees of uncertainty or maximum protection against challenges.”

Thus hedges are linguistic as well as rhetorical devices which are mostly presented by verbal and adverbial expressions (e.g., can, perhaps, suggest, possibly) concerning degrees of probability and serving to bridge between the propositional information in the text and the writer's factual interpretation, "hedges appear least in the almost purely factual (i.e. unhedged). (Carter et al, 2011: 105) Hedging is rather employed to a desire not to express that commitment categorically (Lakic, Vukovic, Zivkovic, 2015: 34). As Halliday admits deontic modality can be regarded as “a form of participation of the speaker in the speech event.” We separate hedging from boosting, or weak epistemic modality from strong epistemic modality, following Hyland's taxonomy of metadiscourse. The relationship between epistemic modality and hedging depends on how the two are defined - in most accounts they overlap significantly, even though there are different views - either modality is a wider concept and includes hedges or the other way round, hedging is the umbrella term and epistemic modality a part of it" In our account, we take them as synonyms (Hyland, 2005).

CORPORA ANALYSIS AND DISCUSSION

Modality covers a broad range of semantic nuances represented by jussive, desiderative, intentive, hypothetical, potential, obligative, dubitative, hortatory, exclamative, etc. - whose common denominator is the addition of a supplement or overlay of meaning to the most neutral semantic value of the proposition of an utterance, namely, factual and declarative (Stamatovic, 2016: 132). Following the terms strong and weak have customarily been applied in the epistemic realm, but very rarely in the deontic one, which the authors do not tend to quantify. Deontic modality has commonly been defined in terms of the concepts of obligation and permission, whereby it is usually noted that verbs with deontic meanings are also polysemous in the modal domain with dynamic and epistemic meanings in addition to the deontic ones. Halliday points out that deontic modality can be regarded as “a form of participation of the speaker in the speech event,” naturally, traditional modal verbs in discourse can be called deontic modal concepts. The strength of the deontic modals thus varies from the strict necessity modals (`must') to weak necessity (`ought') and possibility modals (`may). The standard model encodes a controversial decision rule into the meaning of deontic modals. In situations where the outcome of the speaker's actions is uncertain, s/he should choose the action that has the best potential outcome (Suikkanen, 2018: 354). In discourse we employ hedges to soften what we say or write. Hedges are an important part of polite conversation because they make what we say less direct. The most common forms of hedging like verbs of feeling: suppose, reckon can be used to hedge the speaker's personal confidence in the utterance proposition. Primarily, there are //-structures in the passive: it is argued that and it has been agreed that: The numerous verb classification for English is Levin's (Kipper et al., 2008) work which defines groupings of verbs based on syntactic and semantic properties. VerbNet (Kipper et al., 2008) is an extensive computational verb lexicon for Englishwhich provides detailed syntactic-semantic descriptions of Levin classes (Kipper et al., 2008: 21). Levin's classification provides a summary of the variety of theoretical research done on lexical-semantic verb classification over the past decades. In this classification, verbs which display the same or a similar set of diathesis alternations in the realization of their argument structure are assumed to share certain meaning components and are organized into a semantically coherent class.The meanings of mental verbs are propositional: when the speaker uses the verb recognize as a mental verb, e.g. in the sentence: Of course I recognize your handwriting, the speaker refers only to his or her role as the experiencer of a mental process. In contrast, the performative meaning of recognize, as in the sentence I hereby recognize Mr. Smith, presupposes interpersonal elements inherent in the speech act situation, such as the social relationship between the speaker and interlocutors" (Traugott, Dasher, 1987). Mental state verbs can act like action verbs, fitting into the canonical subject-verb format: I know that and I think so.

In English grammar and speech-act theory, a mental-state verb is a verb with

a meaning related to understanding, discovering, planning, or deciding. Mental-state verbs refer to cognitive states that are generally unavailable for outside evaluation. Common mental-state verbs in English include know, think, learn, understand, perceive, feel, guess, recognize, notice, want, wish, hope, decide, expect, prefer, remember, forget, imagine, and believe. We may observe that mental-state verbs are "notoriously polysemous -- each is associated with multiple senses". We have retrieved the mental verbs which together with the I-PRONOUN form the attitudinal pseudosentence (utterance) in discourse, their overal frequency is also defined the BNC:

I THINK = 40971.

Definition Of the verb: used for saying that you are not completely certain about something, ^e.g.:

Well I think I might come over if you've got ta be there.

I BELIEVE =4311.

Definition: to consider to be true or honest, e.g.

Aye, I believe you have shown a peculiarly passionate intensity.

I EXPECT = 1470.

Definition: regard (someone) as likely to do or be something, e.g.:

Russell home? He's in bed I expect.

I SUSPECT = 1113.

Definition: doubt the genuineness or truth of, e.g.:

But I suspect a lot of you would want to leave them with a matt finish.

I SUGGEST = 1097.

Definition: state or express indirectly, e.g.:

Then he said to her what I suggest you do is to go and buy some cartons of fresh orange juice. I RECKON = 1032.

Definition: to think that something is probably true, e.g.:

Mm my birthday I reckon the cake's really good.

I GUESS = 885.

Definition: to think that something is probably true, e.g.:

And I guess you must have lost erm some of those people would've gone to N 5.

I CONSIDER = 380.

Definition: to spend time thinking about a possibility or making a decision, e.g.:

I consider that IB M strives to be a good employe.r

I ASSUME = 462.

Definition: to accept something to be true without question or proof, e.g.:

Well I assume they're some sort of (pause).

I PRESUME = 333.

Definition: to believe something to be true because it is very likely, although you are not certain, e.g.:

I presume, I don't know whether, they may even have moved now.

I REGARD = 150.

Definition: to consider or have an opinion about something or someone, e.g.:

Mm. I regard open land of this size as being outside the existing built-up area of Skelton.

I ANTICIPATE = 63.

Definition: to imagine or expect that something will happen, e.g.:

Can I anticipate what er we might say in the bad taste bit then.

I ESTIMATE =37.

“to imagine or expect that something will happen, e.g.::

I estimate arrival in the vicinity of the launch pad one hour from launch.''

I INFER: its frequency is 10.

Definition: to derive as a conclusion from facts or premises, e.g.:

I infer from that he may have had reasons other than professional ones.

In some caseS the complementizer that follows the construction: I + V MENTAL + THAT COMPLEMETIZER, e.g.:

Looking at the other titles I infer that mine is the only lecture on literature

However, I estimate that about two hundred thousand other babies were also born that day.

I anticipate that my husband will be home in about an hour.'

In some languages, the distinction between direct and indirect speech can be diagnosed bythe presence of an overt complementizer. Many languages, including English, have an overt complementizer (e.g. that in English) when the complement of verbum dicendi representing indirect speech, as seen in the text fragments above. Some languages, on the other hand, use an overt complementizer to introduce indirect speech.

On the interpersonal level, hedging shields the speaker/writer from potential disagreement and conflict by' down-toning ' language so that a claim is presented as opinion rather than fact, thus affording the writer some protection from counter claims and helping to avoid potential conflict

On the epistemic level, it expresses uncertainty of knowledge and allows the author to show commitment or lack thereof to the truth value of a proposition

On the social level, it emphasises the subjectivity of a claim and allows the author to recognise alternative viewpoints and open a "discursive space" in which these viewpoints can be put forth. We consider theseattitudinalpseudo-clause asembedded onesfrom thesyntactical point which reportt somebody's attitude. Semantic content in the embedded clause can in some cases be interpreted from either of two perspectives: that of the speaker or that of the attitude speaker being reported on.

FINDINGS AND PERSPECTIVE

This paper focuses on modality, particularly deontic modality in discourse. The deontic linguistic form alone may have a manipulative effect]. Hedging is very important in social interaction as well as in academic and professional life. Although it is used to express uncertainty, a hedged statement is more accurate than a blunt generalisation. \

Hedges are classified as “powerless” language and indicate uncertainty, one can assume that women will use hedges more than men, but this thesis needs a broader volume of a corpora study. There is another aspect of semantics of hedging - its gradability to elaborate a matrix of generation and interpretation gradability for the users. In fact, the “uncertain” or “soft” claims are more appropriate, accurate or acceptable.

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