Date of Award
2010
Thesis Type
Masters
Document Type
Dissertation
Divisions
Faculty of Languages and Linguistics
Institution
Universiti Malaya
Abstract
This research explores the use of modals such as will, would and shall which are epistemic in nature in an interview from America’s MTP (Meet the Press) of the present millennium which involves five politicians as speakers. It applies a qualitative approach and is a corpus based lexico-grammatical research which plans to identify the modality and its frequency in only one type of discourse. The research tests aims to test why speakers use epistemic modality and how committed they are towards their views, opinions which become truth propositions when involved in a question and answer session with other participants of a public interview. Concordance is used to analyze the corpora. The data is of an interview selected from the archives of transcripts of interviews with MSNBC MTP dated September 5 2004, the discourses available on the net. The most common auxiliary modals are should, would, can and will while the common lexical predicates used were I think and I believe. It is to show how committed politicians are towards their claims and comments or otherwise. This research showed the politicians were not convinced and committed with their own propositions in their utterances about what was happening.
Additional Information
Dissertation (M.A.) – Faculty of Languages and Linguistics, Universiti Malaya, 2010.
Recommended Citation
Chakrabarty, Papiya, "A study of epistemic modality in a television interview." (2010). Student Works (2010-2019). 108.
https://knova.um.edu.my/student_works_2010s/108
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Included in
Discourse and Text Linguistics Commons, Mass Communication Commons, Semantics and Pragmatics Commons
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