Modal Verbs

In the field of Modern Languages and Linguistics, words are of great importance. A language’s phonology (study of how sounds are organized and used), morphology (study of the form and structure of words), syntax (study of the rules that govern sentence structure), semantics (study of meaning of words, sentences, and expressions), pragmatics (study of aspects of meaning and language use and context), and phonetics (study of human speech sounds) all play an important part in everyday life. These have a major impact in understanding the intent of what is spoken or heard. Due to the importance of communication, literary elements such as metaphors (which are defined as a figure of speech in which a word or phrase

Language, is a way for people to communicate and express their opinions between one another. Yet, another factor is important in engaging with language. This factor is the practice and context of certain words, used to emphasize opinions or generalizations. Through the accounts of Tannen, Sanders, and Hughes, the significance of certain words, and the many interpretations signaled by people of different perspectives, are discussed. The written texts centered around mostly the pragmatic aspect of language, the intentions of spoken or written expression.

Zarefsky broke this long definition apart and repackaged it into a function statement that a rhetorical situation is a situation in which people’s understanding can be changed through messages (Zarefsky 9), and four components, namely the audience, the occasion, the speaker and the

RL.9-10.1.1-7 Reading closely informational texts and viewing multimedia to determine how meaning is conveyed and explicit and implicit through language.

This rhetorical analysis will identify the types Rhetorical Context use in both article journals. It will also explore and break down the Terminology and Content as well as other aspects.

According to Bitzer (1968) rhetorical situation is the “natural context of persons, objects, relations and exigence which strongly invites utterance” (p. 5). Bitzer (1968) stated that the utterance is necessary to complete a situational activity and that how individuals participate in the situation is how the situation obtains meaning and character. Some examples of rhetorical situations are inaugural addresses, eulogies and courtroom speeches. These examples tend to have similar structures and elements so rhetoricians know what effect their actions will have on their audience. This is due to rhetorical genres stemming “from organizing principles found in recurring situations that generate discourse characterized by a family of common factors” (Harrell & Linkugel, p. 263-4). The common factors that Harrell and Linkugel refer to are substantive and formal similarities among discourse of the same type, while the organizing principle refers to the “assumptions that crystallize the central features of a type of discourse” (p. 264). The organizing principles are classified into modes of thinking which are based on principles of

Again, what does that tell us about how meanings are influenced? How accurate can you be about your perceptions of the meanings others might assign? How do your perceptions inform how you communicate with others?

Scholars such as Jonson and Toulmin (1988) emphasized the centrality of argumentation in rhetorical interaction. In his publication entitled the ‘philosophy of rhetoric’ I.A Richards (1936:7-11) criticized the ‘proper meaning superstition’ and adopted different stand to that of the classical period where rhetoric was confined to persuasion, for him the study of meaning represent the backbone for the study of rhetoric. For I.A. Richards words can have various meanings and consequently will result in ambiguity of meaning.

Language can be described in three main ways. Clark (1996, cited in Gee & Hayes, 2011, p.6) called it a 'cognitive phenomenon, and talks of it as being the way we think or something that is in our heads. The second view of language is that it can

In this form, the narrator has used a greater amount of diction one might use to talk to themselves, in a sort of internal monologue. The validity of these first person structures as representations of "fiction" are questioned by Martin, he feels that the type of structure "implicitly claims it is about the real world"(142). Structures of narration that utilize the third person tend to avoid such claims of absolute truth.

Fairclough (1995) clarifies that discourse is not only written and spoken language, but it also visual part that has meaning (p.54).

In the first approach, Hall explains that context and meaning are highly correlated, same expressions, words or sentences could change his meaning drastically in different context, thus being really important to understand it correctly. (Hall, 1976, pp. 85-104)

Expressivism is a non-descriptive (it does not use beliefs or truth-conditions to characterise the meaning of moral terms) semantic theory which holds that ‘’to make a normative judgement is to express a non-cognitive attitude’’ (Gibbard, 1990, 84). The distinctive expressivist claim is that we can give an adequate semantics for moral terms using non-cognitive, desire-like attitudes. This contrasts with cognitivism which holds that normative judgements are entirely descriptive, and that to make a normative judgement is to express a belief. Expressivists are typically seen as following in the footsteps of the emotivist analysis of moral terms offered by A.J. Ayer (1936). Ayer claims that moral language is not literally significant at all. Instead, when we utter a sentence like ‘You acted wrongly in stealing that money’ we have not literally asserted anything beyond ‘You stole that money’.

He seeks to find underlying similarities across these “distinct” languages, to construct a general theory of a singular language. However, it seems as though he cannot be scientifically vindicated without the groundwork being laid down by many of the authors that he is critical of. Thus, it is particularly interesting that Chomsky seems to be so at odds with the idea of descriptivism. When Chomsky says, “Grammar should not be merely a record of the data of usage, but, rather, should offer an explanation for such data,” (587) he is acknowledging the usefulness, presumably to his own theories, of descriptive linguistics. He in fact recognizes the debt he owes when he says, “To me, it seems that [structural linguistics'] major achievement is to have provided a factual and a methodological basis that makes it possible to return to the problems that occupied the traditional universal grammarians...” (590) But he goes on to say, “On the other hand, it seems to me that the substantive contributions to the theory of language structure are few, and that, to a large extent, the concepts of modern linguistics constitute a retrogression as compared with universal grammar.” (590) Where the descriptivists see an end, Chomsky sees only the means, and is somewhat dismissive of them.

I will start by discussing what was particularly challenging about this project. Modals are a highly complex area of grammar both in English and Russian. Several of the texts I have consulted for my project remark on the difficulty of teaching and learning modals. In English, there is a certain level of ambiguity when it comes to the meanings of modals. Depending on what context they are used in, modals can mean several different things and fall into two main categories: epistemic of deontic (Haan, 1995). The modal I am focusing on, “must” or “dolžen,” corresponds “semantically only to the root or “fictive” modals in English. This fact is the very core of great pedagogical difficulty in teaching these Russian modal auxiliaries to English speaking students” (Croft, 1975). Initially, it was challenging even finding articles about Russian modals. The articles I discovered did not have a comprehensive list of Russian modals which made it more difficult to understand. This area of grammar is widely studied in English, but not so in Russian. “Corpus investigations of modality in other languages is lagging behind,” (Haan, 1995) which is why it was difficult to find a Russian corpus to analyze for