MODALITY AND INTENTIONALITY OF MEDIA DISCOURSE

Abstract

The paper investigates the role of lexical and grammatical means of modality in realising intentionality of media discourse. The discourse category of intentionality is understood as the main communicative purpose of a discourse genre which determines its overall structure, the author’s communicative strategies and the linguistic means for their representation. The research is based on material of problem feature articles excerpted from the American press. The paper focuses on the pragmatic analysis of language units expressing propositional modality (possibility, necessity) and illocutionary modality (imperatives and interrogatives) used in different structural parts of a problem feature article. The results demonstrate a different potential of modal utterances with these meanings to express the author’s global intention – suggesting ways of solving the problem raised in the article. A special procedure has been worked out to prove the connection between the modal utterance and the intentionality of the media discourse genre under study.

Keywords

• modality
• intentionality
• media discourse
• discourse genre
• problem feature articles