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УДК 8142:811.1
Шамина Н.В.
Кандидат филологических наук, Доцент кафедры английского языка для профессиональной коммуникации Национальный исследовательский Мордовский государственный университет им. Н. П. Огарёва
Сеничева В.Н.
Кандидат исторических наук Доцент кафедры гражданского и арбитражного процесса Средне-Волжский институт (филиал) (Саранск) Всероссийского государственного университета юстиции DOI: 10.24411/2520-6990-2019-10779 О МОДАЛЬНОСТИ КАК ЛИНГВИСТИЧЕСКОЙ КАТЕГОРИИ
Shamina N. V.
Candidate of Philological Sciences Associate Professor of the Chair of English for Professional Communication National Research Mordovia N. P. Ogarev State University
Senicheva V.N.
Candidate of Historical Sciences Associate Professor of the Chair of Civil and Arbitration Process Middle Volga Institute (branch) (Saransk) of the All-Russian State University of Justice
ON MODALITY AS A LINGUISTIC CATEGORY
Аннотация
В статье модальность рассматривается как лингвистическая категория. Отмечается, что объём понятия модальность и охват им языковых явлений не совпадают в концепциях разных авторов. Трактовка модальности в современной лингвистике необычайно широка. Приведенный анализ показывает, что проблема модальности до сих пор не получила общепризнанного решения в современной лингвистике.
Abstract
The article considers modality as a linguistic category. It is noted that the scope of the concept of modality and its coverage of linguistic phenomena do not coincide in the concepts of different authors. As the authors emphasize, the interpretation of modality in modern linguistics is extremely wide. The analysis shows that the problem of modality has not received a generally accepted solution in modern linguistics yet.
Ключевые слова: модальность, лингвистическая категория, языковые средства, предикативность, семантический признак, коммуникативная ситуация, оценочный фактор.
Keywords: modality, linguistic category, language means, predicativity, semantic feature, communicative situation, evaluation factor.
Extremely complex and extensive problems associated with the category of modality, constantly attracts the attention of researchers in various fields of Humanities, and especially philosophy, logic and linguistics. However, despite much literature, modality is still the most controversial language category. Modality is a universal language, which belongs to the main categories of natural language. The attitude of the speaker (writer) to reality, postulated as the main feature of modality, is more or less characteristic of any statement. Since it can be expressed by various means - formal-grammatical, lexical, phraseological, syntactic, intonation, compositional - modality turns out to be a category inherent in language in action, that is, speech, and therefore is the very essence of the communicative process.
The question of the boundaries of this category is solved by different researchers in different ways. The category of modality can be expressed in different languages by different means. In English and Russian, modality is expressed both by grammatical means -forms of moods, and lexical ones: modal words - ap-
parently, certainly, maybe, perhaps, possibly, probably, surely, etc.; modal verbs - to be able, must, can, may, etc., as well as intonation. In Western European linguistics, the concept of modality is the most widespread one, which treats modality as a syntactic category, in the expression of which modal verbs also play a primary role. This concept followed the German in Germanic studies, which allocate the following as the modal value of reality/unreality, imperativeness, possibility/impossibility, desirability, confidence/uncertainty (presumably, probability).
It should be noted that academician V. V. Vinogradov was one of the first to give a broad interpretation of the modality category in Russian linguistics [2]. His works on the problem of modality (for example, "On the Category of Modality and Modal Words") are still very important for linguists who study various aspects of the problem. According to Vinogradov, modality is an essential constructive feature of the proposal and is therefore inherent in each proposal. Characterizing syntactic categories of modality, time and person as categories specifying and
expressing predicativity, he introduces a sign of the speaker's point of view. Among all categories, in which predicativity is expressed, modality is put forward in the first place. Modality, according to Vinogradov, is "the attitude to reality from the point of view of the speaker." Thus, in general terms, the semantic area of modality was given.
As it is already noted, the scope of the concept of modality and its coverage of linguistic phenomena do not coincide in the concepts of different authors. According to A. M. Peshkovsky, the category of modality expresses only one relation - the relation of the speaker to that connection which is established by him, between the content of this statement and reality, i.e. "the relation to the relation" [3]. The characteristic of modality as the relation of a statement (its prepositive basis) to reality established by the speaker is well-known. According to A.V. Bondarko, the formulation of the understanding of modality in this way is very uncertain [1]. Therefore, he proposes to introduce into the characteristic of the phenomenon under consideration an indication of the dominant feature, which gives some idea of what kind of attitude to reality is considered as the main and specific one to the modality. The vast majority of grammarians consider the category of modality as an expression of reality / unreality of a statement. Modality is understood as a kind of episte-mological concept, not associated with the personal assessment of the subject of thought. However, the process of human cognition includes an element of evaluation, so it seems legitimate to highlight the evaluation factor as one of the most essential features of the modality.
Thus, different linguists mean by modality a wide range of phenomena that are far from unambiguous both in terms of meaning and by means of expression. The traditional definition of modality as a category that expresses the relation of the content of a statement to reality from the point of view of reality-unreality, is rather vague and uncertain. For this reason, the question of the boundaries and content of the modality is solved differently by different researchers. There is every reason to believe that with this approach, the modality appears as a broad multilayered category, reflecting the complex interactions between the four factors of communication: the speaker, the interlocutor, the content of the statement and the reality and, thus, is closely related to the categories of the pragmatic level.
Modality, sometimes involving inclination, is a semantic category dealing with two kinds of judgments: 1) those that relate to the reality of what is being said (confidence, probability, possibility); 2) those that relate to human control of a situation (ability, resolution, intention, obligation). Being at the intersection of logic, linguistics, philosophy of language, the category of modality requires the broadest approach from everyone who tries to understand its essence as one of the fundamental characteristics of the process of reflection of reality by a person and describe specific objects corresponding to it in a particular language. It is no accident that those authors who try to define modality by pointing to specific ways of expressing it
in any language invariably come to contradictory conclusions or find that their definition of modality is incomplete, since it does not cover all possible ways of expressing this semantic category. This suggests the feasibility of cross-language study of modality and varieties of modal values. The functional-semantic category of modality expresses different types of relations between statements and reality, as well as different types of subjective qualification of the reported.
The term "modality" is used to refer to a wide range of phenomena that are heterogeneous in meaning, grammatical properties and degree of design at different levels of language. Modality includes the opposition of statements according to their purpose (statement - question - motivation), opposition on the basis of "statement - denial", gradations of values in the range of "reality - hypothetical - unreality", different degree of confidence of the speaker, expressed in the statement, various modifications of the relationship between subject and predicate, expressed by lexical means (should, maybe, need, etc.). The category of modality belongs to the main categories of natural languages and is recognized as a universal language. The universality of the category of modality determines its applicability in the study of any language. This is adopted by representatives of modern Russian and foreign linguistics, engaged in the study of manifestations of modality in various languages. The corpus of these works consists of dozens of dissertations, monographs, scientific articles, and to date, linguistics has accumulated a fairly extensive base for the comparative study of the category of modality [see e.g.: 4, 7, 9, 10]. Introduction to these scientific works shows that both in the definition of the semantics of modality, and in the interpretation of its categorical manifestations in individual languages remain significant differences.
The category of modality includes the process of expressing and referring to the real reality of the speaker's intention, embedded in the unit of speech -statement. Implementing this function, the category of modality closely interacts, first of all, with the category of predicativity. This interaction takes place on an independent equal basis, i.e. the category of modality carries out its functional duty not as a means of expressing predicativity, but independently, as an independent from other grammatical categories feature of the sentence. The interpretation of modality as a universal semantic feature inherent in any proposal, along with the recognition of the close connection of modality with predication, is, if not universally recognized, then clearly dominant installation of domestic authors studying this category.
Language means of expression of various modal meanings were studied in their entirety: morphological grammatical forms of verbal mood, communicative syntactic types of sentence, modal verbs, modal words and particles, introductory words and phrases, evaluative vocabulary, phraseological units, etc. In recent years, linguists have moved from the consideration of the modality of the minimum significant units of language to the study of the modality of the text [9, 10]. A detailed analysis was made of prosodic characteris-
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tics and rhythmic organization of speech, modality was considered in relation to such categories as the functional perspective of the text, functional style, literary genre, character speech, the image of the author, etc.
Despite the considerable amount of work already available in this field, we consider it necessary the further study of the implementation of the category of modality in the composition of real works of speech. The fact is that the communicative-cognitive direction, popular in linguistics today with its attention to the speaker as a thinking and feeling subject and to the listener as an interpreter of someone else's speech, and also to the unusually complex process of communication, understanding, makes this issue extremely relevant. Indeed, expressing the attitude of the speaker to the content of the statement and the relation of the content of the statement to the reality of the conceptual category of modality allows each time it is necessary to switch from language to speech. Moreover, it enables the speaker to convey, and the listener to understand not only the dry factual information, but also extremely subtle and varied shades of meaning.
It is generally recognized that the texts of fiction are characterized, on the one hand, by integrity and globality, which are provided by the unity of the image of the author, and on the other hand - by diversity [6, 8]. The latter is the result of a complex and ambiguous interaction between the main traditionally distinguished components of artistic speech - the author's speech and the character's speech. These components, these plans of the literary text interact with different degree of unity, providing multi-course, expressive and heterogeneous narration.
Under the character's speech, or speech characteristics, we understand the special selection of words, expressions, etc. as a means of portraying characters. Under the speech of the author, we mean the part of a literary work in which the author appeals to readers from himself, and not through the speech characteristics of the output characters. A kind of fusion of two "voices" - the author and the character - is improper-direct speech. According to V. V. Vinogradov, this is a special stylistic device that allows the author to "transplant" into his speech the words, thoughts and feelings of the characters (without violating social characteristics). It can be extremely difficult to draw a clear line between the author's voice and the character's voice. The issues of the image of the author of a literary work, the author's speech and speech of the character and their linguistic fusion in the improper-direct speech is devoted to extensive literature. The speech characteristic of the literary character was studied from the point of view of its lexical and syntactic design, speech individualization and typing, as an indirect way of expressing the author's assessment. The question of the main categories and parameters of its research was raised. In this work, the speech characteristic of the character appears as the most subjective form of artistic speech, as a fertile field for the study of the speech realization of the language category of modality.
Based on the above, we can draw the following conclusions. In modern linguistics there is no single opinion on the nature and content of the category of modality. The reason for this the fact may be that the concept of "modality" is operated by different sciences - philosophy, logic, linguistics. The interpretation of modality in modern linguistics is unusually wide, besides it is difficult to find two authors who would understand modality equally. The theoretical basis for a broad interpretation of the category of modality is considered to be the study of V. V. Vinogradov, who presented a fairly thorough definition of this category [2]. In this paper, we hold the opinion of those researchers who consider the category of modality as a functional-semantic category that expresses different types of relations between statements and reality, as well as different types of subjective qualification of the reported. We have concluded that the category of modality is the language category for which the functional-semantic model is the most adequate way of description, reflecting the essence of its structure. The category of modality belongs to the main categories of natural languages and is recognized as a universal language. The universality of the category of modality determines its applicability in the study of any language [5]. The main function of the modality category is to organize the sentence from its semantic-semantic side, laid down by the speaker in accordance with the communicative situation of speech at the time of production of this particular sentence. The meanings attached to the proposal can be very different in their shades: from a simple statement of facts to emotional and volitional statements.
Thus, as the analysis shows, the problem of modality has not received a generally accepted solution in modern linguistics yet. The diversity and ambiguity of this category allows us to approach the problem of modality from different points of view and conduct research in different directions.
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