إشكالات الجهة في المنطق و اللسانيات : دراسة تطبيقية في رواية "ثرثرة فوق النيل" لنجيب محفوظ

Abstract EN

Modality is a universal linguistic phenomenon that simply means the speaker's attitude towards what he says.

Despite its simplicity and universality, it poses numerous cognitive, conceptual and methodological problems, which the present research attempted to identify and find solutions to them.

This research is divided into two sections.

The first section is theoretical and aims at identifying the problematic issues of modality in logic and linguistics in terms of its definition, the type of the utterance, the types of modality, the overlap of the term with other terms, and the problems associated with its reception and interpretation and their negative effects.

The second section is practical and aims at showing the involvement of the speaker in the communicative process as an entity immersed in its discourse having his own attitudes and judgments towards his utterances.

This section also aims at showing how modality is achieved in Arabic through actual uses, not through made-up examples.

The results of the present research indicate that modality is concerned with both language and belief, and not only with belief and conceptualization as Aristotle claims, and that Arabic is broader in expressing modality than European languages and richer in ways of achieving each type of modality.

The present research also concludes that each type of modality cannot be separated from the other types because an utterance expressing modality can express more than one type at the same time.