AJ22080 Focus on Language Modality

Faculty of Arts
Spring 2000
Extent and Intensity
0/2/0. 4 credit(s). Type of Completion: zk (examination).
Teacher(s)
PhDr. Milan Růžička (lecturer)
Guaranteed by
Ing. Mgr. Jiří Rambousek, Ph.D.
Department of English and American Studies – Faculty of Arts
Contact Person: Mgr. Michaela Hrazdílková
Course Enrolment Limitations
The course is also offered to the students of the fields other than those the course is directly associated with.
The capacity limit for the course is 15 student(s).
Current registration and enrolment status: enrolled: 0/15, only registered: 0/15, only registered with preference (fields directly associated with the programme): 0/15
fields of study / plans the course is directly associated with
Syllabus
  • This course will be devoted to analyzing and comparing Czech and English exapmples of modality (in isolated sentences and coherent texts). The practical use of this study could benefit those who translate between the two languages, or those who are curious about how languages express similar meanings by non-similar means And what is modality? Modality is a facet of illocutionary force, signaled by morphosyntactic devices (that is, for instance, moods), that expresses the illocutionary point or general intent of a speaker, or a speaker's degree of commitment to the expressed proposition's believability, obligatoriness, desirability, or reality. Although, the term mood is used by some authors in the same sense as modality, I prefer using mood to refer to the contrastive grammatical expressions of different modalities and reserving modality to refer to the meanings so expressed. Here are alternative formal signals of modalities: Verbal inflections Auxiliary verbs Particles Modal adverbs Full verbs We are going to study some of the following kinds of modality necessity possibility (deontic modality) probability (epistemic modality) extrapropositional modality intrapropositional modality sentence type modality (question, statements etc)
Literature
  • LYONS, John. Semantics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977, xiv, 897. ISBN 0521215609. info
  • LYONS, John. Introduction to theoretical linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968, x, 519. ISBN 0521095107. info
Language of instruction
English
Further comments (probably available only in Czech)
The course is taught annually.
The course is taught every week.
Credit evaluation note: 2 původní kredity.
  • Enrolment Statistics (recent)
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