Modal periphrases in lectures and oral interviews

Abstract

In the grammatical tradition of Brazilian Portuguese, the term mood labels the category responsible for expressing the indicative, subjunctive and imperative. For linguists, the expression of mood does not only occur morphologically through mood-temporal suffixes, but also through other resources. Considering that mood can also be expressed by auxiliary verbs, the objective of this paper is to describe the modal periphrases and their uses in a corpus of spoken language formed by eight higher education and pre-university classes and ten oral interviews with researchers. From the data tabulation, it was verified that the most frequent modal periphrases are those of deontic modality, both in classes and in interviews in the corpus investigated in this work. The most frequent uses of deontic modal periphrases in classes are related to mentioning obligations of academic life, such as submitting papers, teaching, correcting tests, solving exercises, dedicating time to studying. Epistemic modality periphrases are those with the second highest frequency of occurrence both in classes and interviews. Some of the uses of epistemic modal periphrases are the expression of potential events, the expression of irrealis modality, the expression of assumptions and conjectures, the expression of suggestions for improvements that could be implemented in different sectors of society based on the results they found in their research. In classes, dynamic modality periphrases were used by teachers to check the conditions of the class, to express the capacity of the subject participant of the sentence, generally a third-person or generic participant. In interviews, the most frequent use of the dynamic modality is related to the use of verbs that express conclusions that researchers reached based on detection, perception or observation.