MODALITY OF NECESSITY IN LIGHT OF V.G.ADMONI’S TYPOLOGY OF GRAMMATICAL CATEGORIES (Based on German-Language Scientific Journal Articles)

Abstract

The modality of necessity is an integral part of modern written science communication: labelling statements as necessary is one of the means of scientific argumentation and also ensures the argumentation is plausible. The article makes use of the term “communicative-grammatical category” suggested by V.G.Admoni, basing on his idea that grammatical forms correlate with certain communicative functions. Thus, the entire palette of grammatical forms of the modality of necessity corresponds to one common communicative function, which is marking a statement as being necessary in a certain degree, i. e. as a nonjudgmental expression of the author’s will. The aim of the article is to determine the relationship between the grammatical forms used to express the modality of necessity in the context of written scientific communication as exemplified by scientific journal articles, which are one of the most dominant text types in modern scientific communication, and the specific communicative tasks that the author verbalizes in a scholarly text. The modal meaning of necessity can also be expressed implicitly, which could be partly explained by the dominance of the epistemic modality in the modal profile of a scientific text. The article uses methods of structural-grammatical, functional-semantic as well as those of communicative analysis of textual expressions containing the modal meaning of necessity. A communicative analysis of selected utterances makes it possible to classify them according to the type of recipient (auto-oriented necessity, reader-oriented necessity etc.) Interactions of this sort between the author and the reader help conclude that the author establishes certain social interpersonal relationships with the scientific community by including the recipient in the text using various means. The empirical background of the research consists of articles from specialized linguistic journals “Sprache und Pragmatik”, “Philologie im Netz” and “Sprachtheorie und germanistische Linguistik” published over the period from 2013 to 2018.

Keywords:

modality of necessity, scientific communication, scientific journal article, linguistic discourse, German language