Modal Frames of English Interrogative Constructions and Their Emotional and Implicative Shades

Abstract

The article presents the results of studying the secondary functions of the interrogative constructions of the English language, actualized in various modal frameworks. The relevance of the research is due to the fact that interrogative sentences, widely used in literary texts, closely interacting with declarative and imperative, are an important means of structuring knowledge about the world. However, they have not yet received a comprehensive analysis of their functional, semantic and pragmatic features. The purpose of the work is to study in fiction the modal framework of English interrogative constructions, as well as their emotional and implicative shades. The subject area of this study relates to the lexical and grammatical level of communication, which can be implemented in everyday, official, special, and other communication. And since all these types of communication are manifested to one degree or another in a literary text, Russian and English fiction of the XIX-XX centuries was used as the main research material. When describing the material under study, both separate sentences and text fragments of variable volume are used, including both explicit and presuppositive indications of the communication situation. With the use of descriptive, functional, transformational and contextual methods, the structural and functional features of interrogative constructions are analyzed, their text-forming capabilities are revealed, expressive and stylistic properties are characterized, the most significant modal frames as indicators of the communicative aim of the utterance. The indicators of modality of the studied constructions are established, which are expressed by intonation, word order, lexical content, context, and the described situation. The reasons for the preference of interrogative constructions in the secondary function to their main function are revealed, the illocutionary acts expressed by them are determined. The cases of modification of the dictum meaning of interrogative constructions in the structure of a literary text are described in detail, as well as the means of modification themselves – context, negator, situation.

Keywords

• interrogative construction
• modality
• modal frame
• dictum
• mode
• illocution