The Cognitive Modelling of Textual Modality

AbstractThe article is devoted to the cognitive modelling of modality on the basis of information-content structure of the English short story text. The cognitive, modal and textual functions interaction may be represented as the hierarchical systerm of textual modality hyperframe, which comprises as essential parts frames of referential and subjective modalities. In its turn, the referential modality frame as the basic layer of the text content embraces the scenes and scenarios of subject, action/state, object, temporality and locality. The subjective modality frame is subdivided into subjective–personal (author – text) and subjective–interpersonal (author – recipient) modalities. Correspondingly, the former consists of the scenes of sensor, emotive (psychic reaction), mental, evaluative and compositional modalities; the latter implies the epistemic, axiological and deontic modalities. The provided textual analysis reveals the interaction of language units of different levels (phonetic, lexical, grammatical, syntactical), activating frames of referential and subjective modalities