Two layers of modal grounding of recommendations

• This article centres on the modal properties of recommendations. Using data from the genre of wine tasting notes, it argues that a recommendation is understood in relation to its role in the social and discursive practice in which it occurs. Recommendations are profiled against two layers of modal grounding in the communicative situation. At the discourse level, recommendations express a weakly deontic speaker stance in that the speaker offers advice which is meant to be understood as beneficial for the addressee and not for the speaker himself or herself. At the clause level, a recommendation makes a prediction about a prospective event. The speaker’s epistemic control over the future event is low and marked by uncertainty. This epistemic stance concerning the outcome of the prospective event is communicated by means of modal and temporal marking, mid-transitivity Gestalts, and generic profiling in the clause.

Ämnesord

HUMANIORA  -- Språk och litteratur -- Jämförande språkvetenskap och allmän lingvistik (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Languages and Literature -- General Language Studies and Linguistics (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

deontic modality

epistemic modality

Gestalt

advice

Construction

temporality

generic profiling

disourse

Publikations- och innehållstyp

kap (ämneskategori)

ref (ämneskategori)