Agonistic Scenarios

Abstract

There are two central concepts that inform this chapter: modality and emotion. I’ll begin with modality. The main sources informing my use of this term are Hodge and Tripp (1986) and the strand in linguistics represented, primarily, by Hodge and Kress (1988). Hodge and Tripp introduce the concept at some length but I will give only a very abbreviated summary here. First of all, they suggest that:

‘Modality’ concerns the reality attributed to a message … In a language such as English there are a number of words whose function is to convey modality — that is, to indicate degrees of certainty of a sentence. If we start with a simple sentence, like ‘It’s a monster’, we have a statement that seems to claim total certainty. Thus we can say it has a strong modality. We can weaken that modality status by adding modal auxiliaries, like ‘may’, ‘might’, etc.: ‘It may be a monster.’ We can further weaken the claim by adding a modal adverb like ‘possibly’ or ‘perhaps’ … .

(Hodge and Tripp, 1986: 104)