Interpreting modality markers in political speeches. In: I-Mean. Conference Proceedings. First International Conference on Meaning in Interaction University of the West of England, Bristol, 23-25 April, 2009.
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| Year of publication | 2010 |
| Type | R&D Presentation |
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| Description | When delivering a speech, politicians exploit the constitutive-of-reality potential of discourse (Wodak 1996) to (re-)construct and negotiate their identities, social roles, views, and interpersonal and institutional relations. Thus they try to impose an interpretative perception of the semantic unity and purposefulness of their discourse which reflects their situationally-motivated communicative goals. This paper explores the resources available for building a coherent subjective representation of a discourse world by investigating some markers of modality in a corpus of speeches of the last three Directors-General of UNESCO at the opening of international conferences and meetings. The analysis of the functions of epistemic modality markers considers their potential to contribute to a coherent discourse interpretation, while discussing variation in the choices of the speakers. It is a bokk of proceedings which has not been allotted an ISBN number. |
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