Analysis of Polarity and Modality in Former President Olusegun Obasanjo’s Open Letters: A Critical Discourse Approach (Published)
This study is an analysis of the deployment of polarity and modality in the open letters of former president Olusegun Obasanjo. The study examines how Obasanjo has used language to construct meaning and convey his perspective on the goings-on in the Nigerian society. The study captures various scholarly works in the area of critical discourse analysis, which is the theoretical framework of the research and further incorporates this theory into the analysis of the data. Data analysis focuses on the assessment and evaluation of the writer’s deployment of polarity and modality in his narrative, and it thus revealed that the writer has dexterously used polarity to assume a position of neutrality, without tilting more or less to either the negative or positive; it has also revealed that the writer’s deployment of modality has helped him express his core concerns, expectations and objectives for a better Nigeria, through the use of certain modal verbs. The study further recommends that future studies should harness other areas of critical linguistics, such as transitivity, mood and intertextuality to help construe the ideational motivations of the writer.
Keywords: : Modality, Critical, Discourse, polarity
The Garden Party Will Go on or Not? Who Persuades Whom? : A Modality Analysis of Mansfield’s “The Garden Party (Published)
This paper seeks to analyze the modality in the interactive exchanges of language as the vehicle of persuasion amongst three characters –Laura, Jose and their mother Mrs. Sheridan- over the question ‘whether or not the garden party goes on’ in the legendary short story ‘The Garden Party’ by Katherine Mansfield. Laura’s strong impulse, on an ethical ground, to put off the party following an impecunious neighbor’s coincidental demise is asserted largely through ‘modality of desirability’. Nonetheless, in the realm of reality, their high ranking whereabouts in societal structure, trepidation of losing face to the already invited visitors, Mrs. Sheridan’s and Jose’s views on Laura’s proposition are outright negative and their reinforcement on the ongoing of the party is essentially demonstrated through their predominant choices of ‘modality of validity’ dedicated in their utterances. Ergo, the garden party does not correlate with the impoverished fellow’s death and it goes on. Fowler‘s (1985) proposed modality categories have been followed in examining how modality makes sense of ‘persuasion’ in terms of the characters’ conversations in the cited text. The outstanding excerpt from the aforesaid text that involves the argument over the settlement of either continuation or discontinuation of the party has been exploited as the data for this modality analysis and a purposive sampling of the data has been adopted.
Keywords: : Modality, Ideology, The Garden Party, persuasive, power relationship, social class