The undergraduate thesis deals with the ways of expressing epistemic (extrinsic) modality in spok... more The undergraduate thesis deals with the ways of expressing epistemic (extrinsic) modality in spoken English. In the light of knowledge gained from individual reference books it offers different views on modality in general and subsequently focuses only on epistemic modality. There are two main ways speakers use to express their commitment to the truth or likelihood of a proposition and these are: grammatical (modal verbs) and lexical (adverb phrase, finite clause). Each branch further examines individual means of realisation, so called ‘epistemic markers’. The second part of the thesis analyses 181 excerpts taken from the film Pride & Prejudice directed by Joe Wright in 2005. The following results of the analysis show that epistemic modality is relatively frequent phenomenon in spoken language (15% of sequences) considering its limited means of realization. The second research question proved that epistemic stance is usually expressed lexically (77%) thanks to its syntactic mobility. Finally, it was detected that the most frequent expression are ‘I think’ (21 cases), ‘must’ (14 cases) ‘I hope’ (11 cases), ‘perhaps’ (11 cases) and ‘I believe’ (9 cases), most of them being lexical. Generally, there is a tendency to express higher degree of certainty rather than lower.
The undergraduate thesis deals with the ways of expressing epistemic (extrinsic) modality in spok... more The undergraduate thesis deals with the ways of expressing epistemic (extrinsic) modality in spoken English. In the light of knowledge gained from individual reference books it offers different views on modality in general and subsequently focuses only on epistemic modality. There are two main ways speakers use to express their commitment to the truth or likelihood of a proposition and these are: grammatical (modal verbs) and lexical (adverb phrase, finite clause). Each branch further examines individual means of realisation, so called ‘epistemic markers’. The second part of the thesis analyses 181 excerpts taken from the film Pride & Prejudice directed by Joe Wright in 2005. The following results of the analysis show that epistemic modality is relatively frequent phenomenon in spoken language (15% of sequences) considering its limited means of realization. The second research question proved that epistemic stance is usually expressed lexically (77%) thanks to its syntactic mobility. Finally, it was detected that the most frequent expression are ‘I think’ (21 cases), ‘must’ (14 cases) ‘I hope’ (11 cases), ‘perhaps’ (11 cases) and ‘I believe’ (9 cases), most of them being lexical. Generally, there is a tendency to express higher degree of certainty rather than lower.
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Papers by Iveta Gustová