The role of deontic modality in the construction and mitigation of evaluation in hard news reporting

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to investigate the role of deontic modality as a strategic means of mitigating evaluative meanings within and across texts. Evaluative meanings concern the function of language as used to express the speaker’s or writer’s subjective opinions, and such meanings have been extensively analysed through Appraisal framework. The framework has been used to account for evaluative/attitudinal meanings in texts, as well as dealing with the interaction of voices as one way through which speakers and writers can attribute evaluations to third parties in order to downplay or distance themselves from the evaluations that are expressed. Within the literature on Appraisal, however, the potential for deontic modality to mitigate subjective evaluation in texts has largely been overlooked and, thus, under-analysed. In this paper therefore, we develop a systems network for analysing the role of deontic modality and its interaction with other features as a tool for text analysis. We illustrate the distinctions in the network with examples of contrasting values from hard news stories that covered the 2011 public sector workers’ strike in Botswana and finish up with a short textual analysis to demonstrate how the consideration of deontic modality as a strategy of mitigation can not only enhance our understanding of how evaluative meanings are downplayed or overridden in texts, but also of how the distinctions between text types themselves can be blurred.

Keywords

• appraisal
• deontic modality
• evaluation
• hard news stories
• mitigation