The Department of English Language Pedagogy and Translation Studies cordially invites you to
Lejla Zejnilovic's guest lecture in Text Analysis
16 April 2018, Monday: 16.00 - 17.30
Tárogató #037, Budapest
Context-driven modality: focus on texts of legal provenience
Believing that legal reasoning represents context that is subject to modalisation, Lejla Zejnilović analyses, through the prism of modality, linguistic items that have their role in developing the argumentative chain in the summaries of the European Court of Human Rights judgments.
In the theoretical framework developed by Zejnilović (2017) certain inherent features of the analysed legal genre – polyphony, intertextuality and argumentative nature - have been recognized as relevant components allowing for the surfacing of modal and evidential values of certain lexical units (e.g. consider, observe, note, find, point out, stress, allege, claim, etc.), which have been singled out as typical features of the genre at the level of lexis, with respect to the role that analysed lexical items have in furthering the argumentation and their percentage of occurrence in the corpus texts. More specifically, Zejnilović proceeds from the view that legal argumentation provides the possibility for identification of exponents of 'propositional modality' (Palmer: 2001), owing to the fact that the opinion of the European Court of Human Rights reflects its 'epistemic reaction' (Sweetser 1990: 70) with respect to the propositions put forward by the lower courts, relevant bodies and applicants, as well as relevant documents, case-law and applicable laws, which gives the summaries of ECHR judgments with the dimensions of polyphony and intertextuality. In other words, polyphony and intertextuality are an inextricable part of legal argumentation which, in the analysed legal genre, reflects the reasoning process of the European Court of Human Rights.
Taking into account the aforementioned, Zejnilović has proposed and the developed the theoretical framework which enables the following: a) identification of certain lexical units, typically employed in the summaries of the European Court of Human Rights judgments, as exponents of propositional modality; b) analysis of semantic domain of examined lexical units; c) their classification as markers of epistemic modality or evidentiality. Proceeding from the semantic notions that the most influential theories of modality have been based on, the following notions have been established as the criteria for the identification of modal and evidential values of the analysed lexemes: interaction between epistemic and evidential domains, scalar values of modal meanings, subjectivity and performativity (Zejnilović: 2017). In addition to the aforementioned criteria, which could serve as a basis for outlining the prototypical structure of propositional modality not only with respect to the given legal genre, but also other domains of language use, in her lecture, Zejnilović will will point out the relevance of the following factors - textual dimension, i.e. the context of use and pragmatic effects, which synergistically bring to the surface subtle semantic nuances encoded by lexical exponents under analysis, and will, therefore, be taken into account while addressing the issues of lexical modality.
All welcome.
