Departamento de Filología Inglesa Universidad de A Coruña Tesis Doctoral presentada por Alan Floyd Moore dirigida por la Dra. Dª. Elizabeth Woodward Smith Título: “The News Discourse of The Times during the Conflict in the Persian Gulf (1990-1991): A Lexicosyntactic Analysis” Vº Bº La Directora Fdo. Dra. Dª Elizabeth Woodward Smith Chapter 6 Modality 6.1. Modality and News Discourse In English, as in most other languages, practically any attitude towards truth and falsehood can be expressed by modality, which could be called a complex linguistic megacategory, where a wide range of structures has to be considered. For requesting, persuading, encouraging, advising, warning, as well as for conjecture and obligation, which are the two principally concerning this chapter, English speakers can use modal verbs, but also many other modal devices, within and outside the verb phrase. The choice of main verb can be an expression of modality, with “look for” having a different grade of certainty than “find”, while the choice of affirmation or negation, tense and aspect, can also be seen as modal choices, as they express the speaker’s perception of events. Then there are marginal auxiliary verbs, intermediate verbs between full verbs and modal verbs, such as “happen to”, “tend to”, “have to”, “hope to”, “need to”, “seem to”, “be bound to”, “be supposed to”, “be obliged to”, “plan to”, “manage to”, “want to” and so on, which appear in scales of modality according to the likelihood of the main verb representing reality.i Apart from these, there are modal idioms, such as “had better” and “would rather”, and so on, which reflect the same kind of attitude to reality as modal verbs, just as “can”, in the sentence “John can swim”, could be paraphrased “John knows how to swim”, while “You may leave” has the same meaning as “I give you permission to leave”. Many other lexicosyntactic choices, not only those within the verb phrase, have a modal side to them, and some have been considered already in other chapters. If “need to” and “have to” are semi-modal, then the adjective “necessary” is also, and disjuncts, although syntactically detached from the other sentence elements, such as “necessarily”, “undoubtedly”, “certainly”, “admittedly”, “obviously”, “supposedly”, “either”, “or” and so on, also have a modal side to them. Modality can also be expressed by a separate “projecting clause”. In the sentence “Scientists have discovered / People now recognize / There is no scientific proof / It is clear / I think / I know ....that CFC’s destroy ozone”, the first part is a “modal projecting clause”, and these can include reporting clauses, such as “She said that 314 Chapter 6 Modality CFC’s destroy ozone”.ii Speech is more modally sensitive than writing, as intonation also adds modality to utterances. Summing up, then, in making practically any utterance we are making a decision whether or not to be categoric or hedge our statement about with modalization. Traditional grammatical categorizations are levelled by semantics and pragmatics, and the relationship between form and meaning is rarely one-to-one. Modality is a crucial element in newstelling, especially in quality newspapers. In fact, with many utterances being representations of the thoughts and opinions of the journalist or others about events, it is not surprising that much of news discourse is made up of statements with some kind of modality. Although news discourse may intend to tell the facts, it is not purely descriptive, and Britain is a country where hedging devices are especially common in everyday language. Some ideological elements enter inevitably, and readers want to be told not only what happened but also attitudes towards events, in particular two important compartments of modality. a. Obligation. What “should be done”, some kind of moral obligation or “requirement”, in functional grammar terms, and what “should have been done” but was not, which are, rather than obligation, often more advisability in these texts. People like to see that their leaders have feet of clay, and there are many statements of a moral kind in news discourse, “our” leaders being under a moral obligation. For example “The bishop said yesterday that Britain must / should / have to make a stand against aggression” is a typical example of the kind of sentence often found in media texts. Editorial comment is particularly subject to modal expressions of obligation, as in: “The campaign against terrorism and its sponsors must be continuous.... Terrorist reprisals must be punished in their turn.” (Daily Express, April 18th,1986)iii Almeida’s survey (1992: 250-256) gives the figure of 0.1 - 0.3% as a proportion of total news discourse given over to necessity and obligation, which I find extraordinarily low. I find a huge number of utterances just reflecting necessity. There is considerable use of both 315 Chapter 6 Modality kinds of modal expressions, which are often value judgments like “should”, “must”, “ought”, “regrettable”, “quite rightly”, “reasonably”, “understandably”, “oddly enough” and so on. b. Conjecture. Conjecture about the future, what “will be done” what “may be done”, and sometimes what “may have been done”, in differing degress of certainty and uncertainty. Again, Almeida (1992: 256) gives the figure of 20-24% of news discourse given over to hypothetical expressions, which shows the huge amount of space given to conjecture, a finding which has been borne out by the present study. It is not practicable, in a study of this nature, to cover all the myriad expressions of likelihood used by writers. 6.2. Modal Expressions in The Times Modal expressions are especially important when ideology is being discussed, and both expressing obligation and hedging statements with hypothetical modal expressions are a favourite element in the news discourse of the quality press in Britain. It has been found in the course of this study that The Times often expresses modality through compound verb phrases, such as, but not exclusively, those involving modal verbs, and that it tends to avoid the direct imperative, but does include other semi-imperative expressions. There is a fundamental division between “epistemic”, on the one hand, and “deontic”, “evaluative” or “root” modality on the other, though there are many ways of slicing the modal cake, and the meaning of modal verbs depends on the context in which they appear.iv The former of these two prototypes of modality, as its name suggests, deals with knowledge, or the lack of it, the speaker’s assessment of reality, the likelihood of truth of the proposition, with certainty, probability or possibility, as in “I must have a temperature” or “He / I / you should / ought to be home by now”, while the latter deals with obligation, necessity, volition, ability and permission, as in “You / I must / should / ought to finish this before dinner”, though the two compartments are not absolutely watertight, there being instances of overlapping between them, as the use of “must”, “should” and “ought to” in both epistemic and deontic modality suggests, and the adverbs “hopefully” and “surely”, as 316 Chapter 6 Modality in “Surely the Security Council will go further than its plaintive and weak request....” (August 4th, Letter) for example, bear both deontic and epistemic meanings. The letter is calling the action both obligatory and hypothetical. Diachronically, the first meaning of the modal verbs was evaluative, and the conjectural sense came later, but what both have in common in modern English is partly their sense of epistemic uncertainty, so that the unmarked case could be said to be the epistemic modals. There are the following similarities between the two sections, obligation and conjecture, in this chapter. Firstly, the utterer has an interest in whether the event occurs, or occurred, or not. Secondly, the act is usually performed by some person other than the utterer, and lastly the act has often not taken place at the time of uttering, but there is a certain undetermined degree of probability that it will take place or has already done so, sometimes called “potentiality”.v The two facets of modal use are thus neighbouring meaning domains, and the grammatical forms straddle this divide, rather as the words “right” and “wrong” do in their logical and moral meanings. There are also other areas of modality.vi The first of the following sections deals with a deontic theme, that of obligation or necessity, while the second deals with an epistemic theme, that called variously possibility, speculation, likelihood or conjecture. The terms chosen are those which seem to me most striking, and those which best illustrate the great divide between “us” and “them”. In the statistical tables in this chapter I have found it necessary, in order to support my hypothesis, to count only the modal verbs used by journalists, editorial comment and letter writers, not quotations from interested parties, as the inclusion of the words of Western politicians and other elite figures would have unfairly weighted the argument, taking into account the amount of space they are granted. However, some impersonal expressions such as “It is (widely) feared / suspected / anticipated / recognized that....” have been included, as have some some quotations of independent analysts and experts. Although it is true that compound forms and simple forms are somewhat different, the former being more easily verified than the latter, examples have been included, as long as semantically the modal verb is largely unchanged, of simple and compound forms, affirmatives and 317 Chapter 6 Modality negatives, with unbounded time reference. Statistically, the number of main verbs in the clause has not been taken into account, so that “We must unite, stand firm and defeat him” would count only once. Modal verbs themselves are the only modal devices analysed statistically. The reason is that, as they are the core of modality, their use is likely to be illustrative of modality as a whole.