Understanding Metaphors and Persuasive Language: A Rhetoric Analysis | Appunti di Linguistica Inglese

UNIT A: HOW TO DO CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

•CDA has its origins in critical linguistics

•critical linguistics → show how language and grammar can be used as ideological

instruments

•criticism to critical linguistics → lack of development of link between language power and

ideology

•CDA develop method theory that could capture this interrelationship and describe the

practices in texts that reveal political and ideological investments

•multimodal critical discourse analysis → images (p7)

MAKING ACTIVE CHOICES: LANGUAGE AS A SET OF RESOURCES

•relationship between language and thought:

•linguistic determinism: language is the way we think of the world – our thinking is

determined by our language

•social context: languages differ in different context

•language is seen as a type of code whose parts are therefore relational rather than referential

•a social semiotic approach to communication → describe choices of signs to understand

what people are doing with them

•halliday → concerned with the social uses of language → it’s important which terms we use

to describe people → language shapes society’s values

•social semiotics → we must understand all processes of communication and they are rule-

based

•social semiotic approach different from traditional semiotics → interested in details of

things

•discourse is language in real contexts of use it operated above the level of grammar and

semantics

•processes of doing CDA involves looking at choices of words and grammar in texts in order

to discover discourses and ideologies

•we should think about discourses as including participants behaviours goals values locations

•(ex. The national we)

•discourses show values and ideas

•the news → use of certain kinds of language = persuasion

•cosmopolitan image → discuss women’s sexuality and independence

•power → comes from priviledged access to social resources such as education knowledge

and health

•the aim of CDA → show what kinds of social relations of power re present in texts

(explicitly and implicitly)

•persuasive influence of power → through rhetoric

•aim of CDA → draw ideologies and see how they are blurred out in texts

•language is used to communicate both ideology and power but also images are used for this

•we should think of all communication – not only language

SEMIOTIC CHOICES: WORDS AND IMAGES

•in visual communication semiotics → resources are udes to communicate things that may be

more difficult to express through language

•visual communication – tends to be more open to interpretation

•words have both connotations and denotations

•ex family home → brings out sets of association

•in CDA it’s assumed that discourse and society are deeply linked

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UNIT A: HOW TO DO CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

CDA has its origins in critical linguistics
critical linguistics → show how language and grammar can be used as ideological instruments
criticism to critical linguistics → lack of development of link between language power and ideology
CDA develop method theory that could capture this interrelationship and describe the practices in texts that reveal political and ideological investments
multimodal critical discourse analysis → images (p7) MAKING ACTIVE CHOICES: LANGUAGE AS A SET OF RESOURCES
relationship between language and thought:
linguistic determinism: language is the way we think of the world – our thinking is determined by our language
social context: languages differ in different context
language is seen as a type of code whose parts are therefore relational rather than referential
a social semiotic approach to communication → describe choices of signs to understand what people are doing with them
halliday → concerned with the social uses of language → it’s important which terms we use to describe people → language shapes society’s values
social semiotics → we must understand all processes of communication and they are rule- based
social semiotic approach different from traditional semiotics → interested in details of things
discourse is language in real contexts of use it operated above the level of grammar and semantics
processes of doing CDA involves looking at choices of words and grammar in texts in order to discover discourses and ideologies
we should think about discourses as including participants behaviours goals values locations
(ex. The national we)
discourses show values and ideas
the news → use of certain kinds of language = persuasion
cosmopolitan image → discuss women’s sexuality and independence
power → comes from priviledged access to social resources such as education knowledge and health
the aim of CDA → show what kinds of social relations of power re present in texts (explicitly and implicitly)
persuasive influence of power → through rhetoric
aim of CDA → draw ideologies and see how they are blurred out in texts
language is used to communicate both ideology and power but also images are used for this
we should think of all communication – not only language SEMIOTIC CHOICES: WORDS AND IMAGES
in visual communication semiotics → resources are udes to communicate things that may be more difficult to express through language
visual communication – tends to be more open to interpretation
words have both connotations and denotations
ex family home → brings out sets of association
in CDA it’s assumed that discourse and society are deeply linked

overlexicalisation → results when there are a surface of repetition (synonims) giving a sense of ovecompleteness
gives a sense of over persuasion and is normally evidence that something Is problematic
it can communicate delibarate and energic action - “dinamic” “innovation”
we can find suppression where certain terms are not there but are expected
we should ask ourselves what lexical terms are missing
vocabulary makes distinction between classes of concepts
if a participant is described as extremist he won’t be expected to be a good citizen
when some oppositions are included we talk about “ideological squaring” → opposing classes of concepts are built up around participants
this does not mean labelling them as good ot bad but this can be implied through the concepts
ex- very different sets of words to describe british and thaleban
texts can use lexical choices that indicate levels of authority and co membership with the audience
authors will try to influence us through claim of having power over us either through hierarchy terms or specialist knowledge
in the first case they could simply tell us we cannot do something
in the second case a scientist might tell us we shouldn’t do something based on his knowledge
informal lexis serves to provide authority using a conversational style will bring to a sense of informality
seen from the use of pronouns (I , you ecc.)
lifestyle magazines use street vocabulary used by the young and trendy → to be up to date
alongside the conversational style we find the voice of experts with more formal vocabulary
the texts we come across communicate not only through words choices but also through non linguistic features and elements (iconography)
cosmopolitan image → connotes identities and practices denotes a woman in a desk
it communicate s a particular set of values about grammat excitement and women’s identity
connotation → we need to describe the desk (shiny, clean,tidy)
clothes of woman is wearing → fashion
what is denoted is usually undervalued in semiotic analysis but to understand connotation we must carefully describe denotation
attributes → number of objects in the image (computer, desk, bag) → connote the woman in non domestic setting.
Scarf, clothes
computer → show the woman active and tied to a desk
setting → light bright and white (happiness and positivity)
salience → where certain features are made to stand out
hierarchy of salience
1- potent cultural symbols
2- size
3- colour
4- tone – bright
5- focus
6- foregrounding
7- overlapping PRESENTING SPEECH AND SPEAKERS: QUOTING VERBS
quoting verbs: verbs chosen to present a speaker
said announce show

abstraction actions – generalised and non specific details of what is done and observed
overlexicalisation – when one is nervous
transitivity – what they are doing – in visual representation
differences between visual and written
muslim women article – image associated with the article shows women wearing buqua and sees them all alike even if in the article they are considered different CONCEALING AND TAKING FOR GRANTED: NOMINALISATION AND PRESUPPOSITION
nominalisation: agent deletion – moved a step forward – verb is transformed in noun
the global economy was changed – the change of the global economy- there is no question of who is the agent or if there is one
effects of nominalisation
people are removed and so is responsibility
both agent and the affected can be hidden
remove any sense of time
the action can be classified through a nominal group – noun surrounded by a group of other nouns that evaluate it
can become stable entities used in common usage
the process is still in the sentence
text become more dense and compressed – details are reduced
to make nominalised sentences – identify the verb and change it into a nominalised form
presupposition: meanings that are assumed in a text and taken as granted
the bag is heavy (we know what bag and heavy mean)
is used in order to build a basis for what sounds like a logical argument
ex- every reasonable person knows that...
suggests that what follows is universally reasonable according common sense truths PERSUADING WITH ABSTRACTION: RHETORIC AND METAPHOR
widely shared assumption that meatphors are used only in poetry
have to explain something in other words
make it more simple
role of metaphor in visual language (I was this close (with finger sign) to hitting him)
in latin metaphora is something that is carried somewhere else – so we carry the meaning from one realm to the other
source domain – concept we draw upon to create the metaphor
target domain – topic we descriibe through the meatphor
hyperbole
personification
metonymy
synedoche
in a text metaphors signalled when a speaker says – metaphorically speaking COMMITTING AND EVADING : TRUTH MODALITY AND HEDGING
people’s commitment to what they say – people what to appear in a certain way
this is called modality
it can be
epistemic – to do with the speaker’s judgment of the truth of any preposition
deontic – influencing people and events
dynamic – related to possibility and ability

modality can be associated with hedging (distance from the discourse) – to avoid critics
modals with high degree of certanty – used to convince people
lowered modality – appear sincere (I suppose – I believe)
the use of modals tells us something about the author’s identity and the power he has on others and over knowledge
hedging can be used to create strategic ambiguity with claims
they avoid directness
it can also be used to give more detail
without hedging the speech would lose the elements that soften its content
hedges – might give the impression that the opposite is taking place
increase the level of clarification instead of offuscating it
seem – prehaps
modality in visual communication – cosmopolitan image
not naturalistic – posed in a studio
this image is a symbolic system
the world of cosmopolitan is happy and positive
modality in photos is indicated by
articulation of detail
articulation of background
perspectve – overlapping
light and shadow tone
colors CONCLUSION:
CDA – is analysis of certain text chosen by the analyst who considers them salient or interesting
it’s too selective
ignores readers
does not pay attention to intentions of the text producers
CDA – claims to interpret of the behalf of people who might be manipulated by them
cognition describes the mental processes involved in reading and understanding texts
it is missing from many studies of CDA
researchers mught overlap data
we can restrict ourselves to
corpus studies + CDA
crìorpus studies can balance qualitative and quantitative methods
ethnografic methods – inteviews and internal insgihts + CDA COLLOCATION AND IDEOLOGY – MASON AND PLATT (FOTOCOPIA PROF)
when analysing language choices it is important to bear in mind that these are limited through restrictions of language
lexical items have a tendency to co-occur with either positively or negatively evaluated words
semantic prosody
discourse prosody
moving from the description of language in general to analysing specific texts we can look for semantic prosodies of words used in a text
we can compare usage in a text to our expectations
identification of salient words → done in two ways
reading the text and choosing important words on a subjective basis

elsewhere. Terror, on the other hand, is more general and can be experienced and thus visualised more easily

The common phrase in which allies occurs in the address is America and our allies. Allies is used to show that on the one hand America is not alone, and also that the terrorist threats are not only targeted against the US.
combination is momentum of freedom, though it does not strike one as particularly unusual in its construction. However, Bush also endows freedom with the capacity of possession, effectively personifying it: our privilege to fight freedom's fight
Evil is used fairly typically
il performs an impor tant function in the media. It provides a catch phrase that can be used to rapidly identify and draw the public's attention to the relevant topic.
War occurs in the speech 10 times and three of these are in the phrase our war.
Family - This semantic field includes women, men, mothers, fathers, and children.
have shown how certain patterns of usage are employed to convey meaning beyond the stat ed propositions.
Laguage is never static: it is more than ready to evolve to suit the conditions of the society it belongs to.
This study has also shown how meaning can be conveyed through devi ation from established patterns of usage.
Understanding the way meaning is created in a text requires public awareness of the underlying patterns of language. However, few semantic prosodies have been documented A HISTORICAL OVERVIEW OF CORPUS ANALYSIS TOOLS
when did the process of developing software tools for corpus analysis begin?
First generation concordances
held on a mainframe computer with a single website
CLOC – concordance pakage used at univerity of birmingham
to build a list of words appearing in a corpus a different corpus should be used
difficulty dealing with non roman alfabet letters
cafè encoded as cafe’
underscore character was used to associate a word to its parts of speech (dog_nn1)
nn1 = singular common noun
fist generation showed that it was preferable to build tools that bundled different softwares all together
would allow data to be manipulated in as wide range of ways as possible
second generation concordances
corpus linguistics needed a computer and a team to work on it
pc based concordancing
any linguist who could switch on a pc could use a corpus
worse than the first gen.
The computer just interpreted the corpus as a long stream of different texts and did not know which parts were words and which parts of speeches
third generation
large datasets on pc
working with a disparate range of languages
build a frequency list
display the concordances
derive key words
each opf these procedures may then carry out annotations
specialisations of particular tools
level of maturity in the tools used

treebanked corpus → the main syntactic constituents are annotated
very complex and multilayered
but it lacks from concordances in general use
range of existing corpus can be extended
limited resources
fourth generation
need to expand the range of corpus
preferred solution – make the corpus available on web and for free
make tools available on web to make your own corpus
searches can be completed faster
web- based concordances – the web page contains the results
indexing – tags can be created for the program to look up words without going through the entire corpus
this is the only thing the fourth generation has done APPUNTI MODULO A
LESSON 1: CORPUS LINGUISTICS: A WAY OF STUDYING LANGUAGE
languages are not all the same according to chomsky all humans share the same language faculty that regulates the way signs are organised so we can make utterances
this is called grammar
for chomsky innate language faculty shapes the grammar
lexicon – more or less finite list of lexical entries
languages resemble eachother because their grammatical parts can be described in the same way
languages may follow different rules but they are made up of the same entities and share many properties
chomsky only marginally considered lexicon
but if we think that people speak different languages and we don’t understand eachother this is due to lexicon
linguists must analyse languages and their lexical patterns
easier to learn foreign syntax than vocabulary
translating – we are confronted with the ambiguity of dictionaries
thanks to context – while reading – we have no ambiguity
to understand what words mean – use corpus linguistics
CL studies language on the basis of discourse
it works with a sample of discourse this discourse sample is the corpus
1960s → first corpus
these were the years when chomsky was approaching linguistics studies and he did not consider the use of real data to demonstrate the function of language
introspection and intuition ruled over observation
chomsky’s linguistic research was based on samples of language
he suggested corpus would never be a useful tool to linguistics
competence → internalised knowledge of a language performance
performance → external evidence
for him linguistics wanted competence rather that performance
for him – corpora are just a collection of externalised utterances – just evidence of performance – so not useful
Randolf Quirk analysed common popular and frequently registered exchanges (written and spoken)
for spoken → technological innovations helped
taper recorder

study how lexical items are formed
compare the use
teachers may ask students to find meaning and grammatical patterns (ex – CONCERN)
LESSON 4: CORPUS TECHNIQUES
any modern day corpus has to be representative of a language variety
some of the basis techniques are:
concordancing: find every occurrence of a word or phrase
word frequency counts: HANDOUT FREQUENCY LIST
difference in frequency lies in written and spoken
spoken – a lot of discourse markers
written – a lot of 3rd^ person
key word analysis: see keywords in more than one text in the same field
handout keyword list: tax, income ecc
cluster analysis: asking a computer to rank word combinations – handout cluster list
LESSON 5: APPROACHING CORPUS LINGUISTICS ANALYSIS
way in which data is observed – two approaches
corpus based / corpus as method approach: used to refer to a methodology that avails itself of the corpus to explain test, exemplify theories
corpus evidence is introduced ad an extra bonus
the linguist can decide that same data can be given and other data doesn’t fit
main concern is establish to what extent language occurring in a corpus is acceptable
standardisation: approach within this first approach in which the linguist examines the theory uses intuition and then draws from the corpus
instantiation: builds the data into a system of abstract possibilities
the secon approach is: the corpus driven or corpus-as-theory approach
the data is observed in order to challenge new theories
observe data, make generalizations, unify everything into theory
not mechanical but mediated by the linguist
importan is also the context in which phrases and words are put
LESSON 6: CONCORDANCES AND LEXICOGRAMMATICAL PROFILES
to benefit fully from a corpus linguistics analysis we must look farther than the frequency list
look at concordances which show:
collocates: which words occur more frequently in word environments
chunks-idioms: does the word form a chunk or idiom?
Colligation: what is the word’s most common synctactic pattern?
Semantic preference: are there semantic restrictions?
Semantic prosody: connotative or attitudinal meaning of a word determined by positive or negative collocations of words collocated with it
by looking at lexical collocation and grammatical colligation we can see the various meanings of words
understand the typical structure and central structure (ex critical occurs before point and angles and work)
most owrds have meanings that are similar but in constructions they are not always subtituible
large and big – similar – but – big house, cuty → collocates are not always similar
large occurs more frequently than big in the BNC UNIT C: USING CORPORA IN DISCOURSE ANALYSIS
INTRODUCTION:
corpus linguistics → study of language based in examples of real life language use

qualitative and quantitative approaches to research – depends on both techniques
large representative samples of a particular type of naturally occurring language
term discourse – is problematic it’s either defined as language above the sentence or language in use
the term discourse is also applied to specific languages like political discourse
system of statements which construct an object
DA can show why people talk and behave in a certain way always within a context
one way discourses are constructed is via language
the difference in language usage can be analysed based on identity
the problem when working with corpus-based method is that objectivity is impossible
people tend to focus more on information that they encounter at the beginning
select information that confirms our theory nd ignore things that may take a step forward
by using a corpus we may put restrictions on things
DA has to uncover how language is employed and reveal underlying discourses
a single word may suggest the existence of a discourse
but it can be difficult to tell weather a discourse is typical or not
discourses are not static they continuously change
a computer-based analysis can uncover hidden patterns
people understand better when they are given real life examples
CORPUS BUILDING:
one of the problems in DA is that we are dealing with decontestualised data
researchers must familiarize with corpora
a corpus does not consist of any collection of texts
researchers select them according to types
if we use equally sised samples it will be more representative of that type
in DA it’s not good to take different parts of the text, it’s better to have them all
if a corpus must be specialised it must be little
it’s not important how large it is but which words it has
diachronic corpus → corpus which has been built to represent a particular variety of language over time
reference corpus → language corpus like the BNC
but these RC may not containthe types of words we need – this is why for particular research we must build our own corpus
written data is usually more easy to get
spoken data archives already exist
problems when collecting data: repetition / file attachements (should it be included?) get copyright from authors
copyright → a study in the corpus may shed light on aspects like racism or others that aren’t evident in articles and put authors in unconfortable light
annotations → header (gives refernece information about particular texts) grammatical annotations (attaching codes to words like BNC)
obtaining access to reference corpus helpful for:
1- RC are large and representative enough for a particular genre of language
2- acs as a good benchmark of what is natural in language
may help us test out theories
access to RC useful for carrying out DA
large reference corpora can require a great deal of computer memory
FREQUENCY AND DISPERSION:
frequency one of the central concepts
how they can be employed
example of holiday brochures → see how much authors use the words to persuade
thenks to frequency we can see how they persuade

bachelor’s button – horse in sport
days as bachelor are happy
pairing of bachelor and life is happy and eccentric
living and bachelor is less positive – lonely
elderly – lonely + bachelor – negative
confirmed bachelor – euphemism for homosexual
short term bachelor life in positive
collocational analysis has shown some of the most salient discouirses and different ways of referring to bachelors and spinsters
useful for two reasons:
it provides a focus for our initial analysis which is particularly helpful when a large number of concordances lines needs to be sorted out
it gives the most salient lexical patterns surrounding the subject
collocational networks → plotting links between collocates – links between different words and types of discourses
they show a lot of associations that can be done with a word
NB – not over interpret data
KEYNESS:
frequency lists also possess limitations
fox hunting discourses – comparing two discourses on pro fox hunting and one against
first the study was carried out on a word list of fox hunting corpus
comparing – is odne to see which elements can be interesting to the research
in the debate each speaker had to vote on the issue banning fox hunting
their contributions to the debate would be made with an idea of persuading others to vote the same way as them
using wordsmith it’s possible to compare the frequencies in one wordlist against another to determine which words occur statistically more often in one or another
then all the words that occur more often than expected are compiled in another list called keyword list
this gives a measure of saliency whereas a simple wordlist only provides frequency
wordsmith gives each word a P (probability value) the smaller the p the more likely the strong presence of the word is due to the author’s choice to use that word repeatedly
one aspect of the list that isn’t helpful is the number of proper nouns in it
the words on the extreme of a keyword list are the strongest in terms of occurring significantly
criminal is used by pro-hunters – for framing the proposed for hunting bar as criminalizing people that do it
criminal – make, invoke, impose – rhetorical strategies to strengthen a particular discourse position
the word dog – appears in the cluster hunting with dogs – most frequent cluster in both sides
the word people – key in the pro hunt side of the debate and often used in attempts to reference a large mass – people affected by the bill and people who do it
but maybe these aren’t enough keywords so we go back to the wordlist with p values and look at them again
fellow citixens – related to people – but gives a sense of community
we could have expected to find words as cruelty in the anti hunting- but it occurred 124 in anti and 106 in pro-hunt
the way it occurs is quite different – the anti hunt uses it with the words unnecessary, prevent, ban
pro-hunt uses it with test, prove, evidence, define
focus now on clusters with the word cruelty
strong rhetorical impact of this word

lower frequency words will not appear in the list because they do not occur often enough to make sufficient impact
this may be a problem because tesìxt producers may use sinonyms to avoid repetitions and the synonims are not included
pro-hunt – frewuent reference to ethics – based around attempts to complicate the ethical positon of anti hunt
keyness works very well when comparing
BEYOND COLLOCATION
aspects of DA can be more concerned with grammatical patterns, it’s not easy to use a corpus to analyse grammar
ex – talk about rape – use of specific language – choice of words – like the word allege
look at the way allege is presented in the BNC
it can be a verb a noun an adj
the sdj form in the corpus is quite popular
the verd collocate strongly with legal pretences
the nominalized form is usually used in denial
two voices – the main narrative voice and a spokeswoman
both remain vague in confirming or denying the rape really happened
the largest set of adj used to describe allegations are those which relate to certainty and most indicate denial
do the nominalised orm has a strong prosody for denial
different modal verbs can be used to show different levels of authority
while reporting allegations there are a number of factors: accusant – defender – raper – rapee
people involved in allegations are not refered with their names but as woman man, policeman
a single sentence may oscure the actor – these are ludicrous accusations – shhe could have said ludicrous (rape) accusations – but she obscured the fact
another way of hiding associations is through metaphors
they can help reveal discourses surrounding a subject
ex – flood of refugees (metaphor) unless they were refugees in a flood of water
metaphors can be found by looking at strong collocates APPUNTI MODULO C
LESSON 3: ANALYSING WORDS AND IMAGES
picture analysis
iconography: what does it show/denote/connote – how can we interpret the image
attributes: ideas and values represented
settings
salience: features that stand out
discourse analysis
word connotations: choice of words
overlexicalisation: over-ephasis of certain items / words repeated / synonyms
suppression or lexical absence
structural oppositions: words mean not only on their own but as a network (anonyms and opposites)
lexical choices and genre of communication: the way authors chose their words
the mixing of two lexicons (formal and informal) helps to infuse official discourse with a populist voice
LESSON 4: PRESENTING SPEECH AND SPEAKERS – QUOTING VERBS
quoting verbs → the choice of verbs can lead you to make evaluations of the situation

The first id the actor
the second is the goal – person and entiity affected by the process
john kiked the ball(goal)
the goal can be omitted
material processes can be subdivided on the basis of finer distinctions in meaning
when the process is performed by an animate actor is referred as action process
it can be divided into: intention (perform the act voluntarily) supervention ( just happens)
when the process is performed by an inanimate actor → event process
verbalization process → the process of saying
mental process → the process of sensing – they are internalised
they can be defined as perception processes (seeing – hearing) reaction processes (liking – hating) cognition (thinking)
they have two participants – sensor and phenomenon
he likes Mary(phenomenon)
behavioural processes → denote phsychological and physical behaviuour and are signalled by verbs such as watch, taste, stare, dream
relational processes → express the process of being
these can be – intensive (expressing an x is a relationship) possessive ( expressing an x has a relationship) circumstantial (x is at/on a relationship)
mary is wise / tom has a guitar / bill is at home
existential processes – expresses processes that represent that something exists or happens
signalled by verbs to be synonyms such as exist ecc..
transitivity in DA → employed to uncover how certain meanings are foregrounded while pthers are suppressed or obfuscated
showa how linguistics structures of texts can show a particular view of the world
critical linguistics analysis will interpret linguistic structure of texts
ex – the guardian in an ecstract employs an active contruction making the actor the first element and the goal at the end.
The times adopts a passive construction, putting the goal first and the actor last, this puts less importance on the actor
it might serve to shift attention from the actor
lexical choices are a strong inicator
LESSON 7: NOMINALIZATION AND PRESUPPOSITION
effects of nominalization – people are removed
effects of the actions are reduced
the sense of time is removed
nominalizations become stable entities
presupposition: menings that are assumed in the text
reconstitutes the social world and does not allow contestations
it’s the basis for powerful and effective rhetorical strategies
every person knows that…. Nobody in their right mind would think that….
Nominalization helps to coceal ideas responsabilities and contexts
presupposition leads readers to take facts for granted and allowa writers to imply meaninigs that are not overtly stated
LESSON 8: PERSUADING WITH ABSTRACTION – RHETORIC AND METAPHOR
metaphorical thinking underlies all our statements about the world
metaphor is an everyday part of language
they have hidden ideologies due to the way they can conceal and shape understandings and at the same time giving the impressions that they reveal them
hiding power relationship
can be useful in dealing with highly complex concepts that are difficult to understand and perceive

def. = a transcription of a process of understanding from one relam of conceptual domain to another
target domain and source domain
recurring metaphorical concepts of how we see the world
rhetorical tropes: vedi sopra le figure retoriche
LESSON 9: COMMITTING AND EVADING – TRUTH, MODALITY AND HEDGING
modality includes any unit of language that expresses the speaker’s or writer’s personal opinion
4 modal systems -
deontic modality: influencing people and events – attitudes of obligation expressed by may, should, must – you may/should/must leave (diversi significati)
sets up connection between the speaker and the hearer – strategy of social interaction
epistemic modality: speaker’s writer’s judgement of the truth – expresses the subject’s lack or confidence of the truth
you must/may/ might be right
expresses the degree of the basic preposition you are right – which one is nearer to the truth
may have also lexical verbs of modality like “I think you are right” “certainly you are right”
perception modality: subcategory of epistemic → the degree of commitment to the truth is predicated by the person’s personal judgement → it’s clear you are right/ I suppose/ I think/you are apparently right
dynamic modality: the use of modals to tell us something about the author’s identity and how much power they have over others
staff will/shoul/we think/ notify the university – descending degree of autority
Hedging → to distance ourselves from what we say

Understanding Metaphors and Persuasive Language: A Rhetoric Analysis, Appunti di Linguistica Inglese

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UNIT A: HOW TO DO CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS