The Relationship between Polarity and Clausal Modality in Persian

Abstract

Polarity is the opposition between positive and negative and Modality is the speaker’s judgment about the proposition and proposal. In fact, modality is the space between ‘yes’ and ‘no’. In this study, four main types of modality including “epistemic”, “evidential”, “deontic” and “dynamic” from Palmer's point of view, and three types of negation including “nuclear negation”, “core negation” and “clause/ sentence negation” based on Role and Reference Grammar of VanValin were introduced and then the relationship between them was investigated in the Persian. In order to determine the polarity of the nucleus, the presence or absence of a negative prefix, and to determine the polarity of the core, the relationship of the verb and its arguments has been considered. To detect the polarity of the sentence, two tests of “tag question” and “lie test” were used. Examination of the data showed that when the modality of the sentence is changed, the polarity of the sentence is changed as well. It seems that the combination of modality and polarity is a strategy for language users to be able to formulate the same propositional meanings in different ways according to different contexts, and thus follow different discourse purposes.

Keywords

• polarity
• modality
• negation
• modal verb
• role and reference grammar
• persian