Semantics of doubt and ways of its expression in modern Russian mass media texts

Abstract

Modality was a logical concept originally, but it has become a linguistic concept now, which gets new interpretation and development in linguistics. It has experienced a dynamic development process from sentence modality to discourse modality. As the human factor in language has become the focus of linguistic research, the subjective factors embodied in language, namely subjective modality, have also received more attention and esearch. The mass media is one of the main objects of modern linguistics research. Its rapid dissemination and development have provided a large number of fresh corpus and many new research topics for linguistics. Subjective modality is one of the essential properties of mass media. As an integral feature of media text, subjective modality expresses the author’s evaluation and attitude towards the content, conveys the author’s emotions, reflects the author’s thoughts and worldview, and it is a means of interaction between the author and the reader. It directly affects and determines the definition, classification and characteristics of mass media. Doubt as an expression of personal attitude in the process of comprehending the facts and phenomena of reality is traditionally considered in the area of subjective modality and presented as one of the subjectivemodal meanings. This article uses mainly the methods of interpretation and analysis to introduce the doubt as one of the author’s subjective modality in modern mass media. By analyzing “Explanatory Dictionary” by Morkovkina, “Explanatory Dictionary of the Russian Language: 80,000 Words and Phraseological Expressions” by Ozhegov and “Explanatory Dictionary of the Russian Language” edited by D.N. Ushakova, we found that typical for expressing doubt is the use of indirect markers, namely: modal-doubtful particles, introductory-modal words, modal phrases. Based on variants of the semantics of doubt, described by I.G. Nikolskaia, using the text of modern Russian-language mass media as corpus, we have analyzed the typical contexts of expressing doubt in media texts, as well as its realization in modern Russian mass media texts.