Epistemic Assessment and Pragmatic Factors of Its Motivation in the Reportage News Text

Abstract

Within this publication attempts are made to explore the pragmatic factors that motivate the use of epistemic modal means in the context of news reportage messages. News reports are viewed as a special type of mass media discourse. The communicative purpose of this discourse is to provide the target audience with up-to-date information that the journalist believes (thinks, admits) to be true or will become so in the future. In this regard the journalist as the author of the reportage text consistently reflects this or that degree of confidence that this information corresponds to the objective reality, relying on the knowledge of the situation or opinion of more competent people. The newspaper genre manifests the intense action of the category of epistemic modality. Within the scope of our research the issues are included related to the epistemic modal means used by journalists in the indirect reflection of their assessment that are reported in the text of the reportage. We seek to trace the constructive interaction of two factors – epistemic modality at the linguistic level and news discourse at the contextual level, pragmatic connection between journalistic choice of means of epistemic marking of the message and the assessment implemented in this agreement.

Keywords

• reportage news text
• proposition
• judgment
• journalist point of view
• assessment
• epistemic modality
• evidentiality