Category of Modality in Belles-lettres and Journalistic Styles

The article presents the results of a comparative analysis of subjective modality in literary and media texts. Subjective modality is connected with the speaker's attitude to the statement. In the text, it is realized in the form of the so-called modal meanings. We compare the ways of expressing subjective modality in the texts belonging to different functional styles: belles-lettres (emotive prose, drama, poetry), newspaper, and publicistic. We have chosen examples from fiction as well as from media texts, because we suppose that the modal meanings they convey depend on lexical and grammatical means of expressing subjective modality in the text; if it is a recorded text than the major role belongs to intonation. If modal markers can be found in the whole text, one can speak of the so-called 'diffuse modality'. The results of our analysis show that it is possible to single out three types of modal meanings forming three groups: group A – speaker's attitude to the content of the speech, group B – speaker's attitude to the addressee; group C – the attitude of the speaker towards themselves. Modal markers are mainly concentrated in leading segments of the text. In most of the texts, these means of expressing text modality are connected with text genre, especially in media texts, which belong to rational and emotional journalism. In media texts, subjective modality is often displayed by various communicative manipulative strategies used to form the public opinion.


Introduction
In linguistic literature, modality is broadly defined as a category expressing the relation of an utterance to reality from the viewpoint of the speaker, the speaker's attitude to the content of the utterance, and the attitude of the agent to the action. Such an understanding of this linguistic category reflects the interaction of objective and subjective modality and the ways of its linguistic expression, which are lexical, grammatical, and intonational. Our hypothesis is that the role of these means varies and greatly depends on the text genre. We can specify different modal meanings (MMs) in the text thanks to modal markers, which can also be considered as the signals of addressee orientation. We aim to specify how subjective modality is expressed in fiction (i.e. prose, drama, and poetry) and in the media text; to find out leading and background segments in these texts and to identify the role of different means in expressing modality. For this purpose, we use componential, contextual, and stylistic analysis focusing on the means of stylistic syntax and semasiology; in poetic texts, attention is given to the means of phonetic stylistics and in recorded texts, auditory and acoustic analyses have been carried out. In media texts, especially in oratories, manipulative techniques are used. Thus, pragmatic and discourse analyses help identify persuasive communicative strategies.

Modality and its types
The question of the nature and boundaries of the category of modality is among the most complicated and controversial ones, since modality as a conceptual category is multidimensional and its interpretations differ. Introduced by Aristotle, "this notion found its way into classical philosophical systems and came to characterize the mode of existence of a phenomenon or the way of judgment about an object, phenomenon or event" (Gastev, 1977, p. 390).
Being part and parcel of such philosophical concepts as possibility and reality, necessity and contingency, modality is treated as an objective-subjective category, which relates the expressed thought to reality. The works of philosophers and logicians consider two kinds of modality: objective (ontological), which reflects the nature of relations in reality itself, and subjective (persuasive), which reflects the assessment of the adequacy of this reflection, as well as the modality of the search for events (Zinovyev, 1967).
All the varieties of modality accepted in general linguistics, e.g., communicative-grammatical, syntagmatically connected and some others can be understood as objective and subjective modality. Objective modality refers to the phenomena of language, and subjective modality by the nature of the means of expression and by the nature of the relation itself is a speech category. "Objective modality gets its expression at the level of the syntactical organization of a sentence. Subjective modality manifests itself at the level of the logical-grammatical division of a sentence, which is due to the cognitive process on a given phenomenon of reality" (Panasenko, 1985, p. 12).
Subjective modality is encoded in a speech by extralinguistic, psycholinguistic, and linguistic ways of expressing communicative meaning itself. Extralinguistic factors include the historical situation, in which communication takes place, the social role in which the subject acts, and the degree of kinship or familiarity, that is the context. Palmer (1990) distinguishes three major categories of modal meaning: "epistemic, dynamic and deontic modality connected with the judgement about the truth of the proposition, with the ability and volition of the subject of the sentence and concerned with influencing actions, states or events" (1990, p. 6-7). His classification was further developed by other scholars (Depraetere 2019;Nordlinger & Traugott 1997). We have taken into account his classification as well as others while processing our language material. Our aim was to make a comparative analysis of linguistic means expressing subjective modality in texts belonging to different genres and to specify their role in each group of texts. For this goal, we have chosen 50 fragments from prose texts (novels by Iris Murdoch The Book and the Brotherhood, The Sea, the Sea, and A Word Child), fragments from the plays by George Bernard Show (Major Barbara and Man and Superman); Oscar Wilde The Importance of Being Earnest); poems by British and American authors and extracts from written and oral media texts. What concerns literary texts, we also used their recorded versions for the analysis of the intonational means, but in this article, we present the results of lexical and grammatical means of expressing subjective modality.
These texts were given to the informants with the purpose of identifying modal meanings they convey. The informants were students and teachers of the faculties of arts. Modal meanings were identified on the basis of the special questionnaire.
The informants state, that in oral speech (extracts from drama, oratories, etc.) the important factors influencing modality include the emotional state of the speaker, their temperament, language habits, educational level, interests and tendencies, mood at the moment of speech, age and gender, and some others.
Utterances belonging to different genres exhibit varying degrees of modal colouring. It is most vividly displayed in emotional speech (colloquial style). The modal function of intonation in poetry and stage speech, rhetoric and public speaking is of great importance. Intonation is particularly salient when it comes to oral texts, being sometimes the only (though powerful) means of expressing different MMs. Intonation, comprised of a number of components, e.g., timber), can add the phrase "You can drive a car, darling" such a MM as sarcasm, anger, etc., which will be totally different to the lexical meaning of this phrase. Grammatical means mainly associated with subjective modality are special forms of moods and modal verbs, which show the relation of the utterance to reality (real/unreal condition). There are also modal words of subjective-evaluation semantics. You may find it in any grammar book in the relevant chapter that English modal verbs combined with different Infinitive forms can express different MMs, e.g.: reproach -might + Perfect Infinitive; doubt -can/could + Infinitive (Continuous, Perfect, Perfect Continuous), warning, threat -shall + Infinitive (Indefinite, Continuous); irritation -should + Infinitive (Indefinite, Continuous). Interesting examples can be found in the research conducted by Depraetere (2019).
The aim of informants was to find in the texts MMs, which mainly belong to the lexical level of the language and are the prime focus of our attention. Stylistic analysis appeared to be very useful in written texts belonging to different styles. We cannot but mention the means of stylistic syntax (stylistic inversion, repetitions, emphatic constructions), which are connected with the word order and logical emphasis, i.e. with intonation.
We used the classification of MMs based on functional-semantic and logical-communicative principles offered by Panasenko (1985) and have considerably revised it. The functional-semantic classification is connected with basic speech types: "dialogue vs. monologue; monologue is further subdivided into three basic types, like narrative, description and reasoning and their varieties" (Panasenko, 2016, p. 60). The logical-communicative principle makes it possible to establish the relevant groups of subjective-evaluative MMs: group A -the speaker's attitude to the content of the speech, group B -the speaker's attitude to the addressee; group C is the speaker's attitude to himself or herself. These three groups can be presented as: group A -cognition and evaluation (Speaker 1 → Object), group B -communication (Speaker 1 → Addressee 2 ); group C -self-knowledge, self-esteem (Speaker 1 → Speaker 1 ). All MMs fall into one of the three groups, expressing a negative (antipathy), a neutral (doubt) or a positive (sympathy) attitude. These three basic MMs can be accompanied by additional ones (negative -hatred, disillusionment, regret, etc.; neutralindifference, lack of confidence; positive -surprise, tenderness, approval, admiration, etc.). All these additional as well as basic MMs were identified in the texts by our informants. The most interesting examples of different MMs in the texts belonging to different genres and styles are presented below. Now we will consider some interpretations of style and its varieties, which will be followed by an illustration of different types of MMs in fiction and media texts.

Classification of functional styles
Before delving into the intricacies of style classifications, one should look at least briefly at what style per se actually is. Simpson considers style as choice and claims that "choices in style are motivated, even if unconsciously, and these choices have a profound impact on the way texts are structured and interpreted" (2004, p. 22). Jeffries and McIntyre (2010, p. 19) speak not only about "the style of a single text (advertisement, letter, poem, novel, play)", but also about the individual "author's output … (e.g., by poetry collection or groups of fictional works by date)." It is an important notion in journalism: "Style in journalism can be defined as the choice between functionally equivalents of language" (Broersma, 2007, p. 13).
Diachronically one of the earliest is the classification by Kuznets and Skrebnev (1960), who divided all styles into two large groups with further subgroups: A. Literary, or 'Bookish' Style, including Publicistic Style, Scientific (Technological) Style and Official Documents and B. Free ('Colloquial') Style, including Literary Colloquial Style and Familiar Colloquial Style. Later this classification was criticized and enlarged on by one of the authors (Skrebnev, 2003, p. 167-178).
Another meticulous classification effort was made by Galperin (1971). Devised many years ago, the classification has inspired numerous scholars to revisit it over and over again, and in our view continues to demonstrate its relevance. Functional styles are differentiated by Galperin in the following way: belles-lettres -emotive prose, drama, poetry; newspaper style -brief news items and communiqués, press reports (parliamentary, of court proceedings), articles purely informational in character, advertisements and announcements, editorial; publicistic styleoratories and speeches, feature articles, essays; book reviews; radio commentary; scientific prose style -the language of exact sciences, humanitarian, popular scientific prose; official document style -the language of business, legal documents, diplomacy, military documents (1971).
Not to be overlooked is yet another classification of styles suggested by Crystal (1990;2000), which clearly stands out and includes regional, social, occupational, restricted and individual styles. Of these types, occupational styles are particularly pertinent, as they include the news media further subdivided into news reporting, periodical press, broadcasting, sports commentary, and advertising. The term "individual style" can be used in the meaning of the speaker's habits, origin and education, but it can also be considered as the author's style. Znamenskaya (2005) describing five basic styles -literary colloquial style, familiar colloquial style, publicist (media) style, the style of official documents, and scientific/academic style -presents their morphological, syntactical, lexical and compositional features as well as the phonetic features in oral texts.
Miššíková distinguishes between publicistic and newspaper style. She writes that "[t]he general aim of the publicistic style, which makes it stand out as a separate style, is to exert a constant and deep influence on public opinion, to convince the reader or the listener that the interpretation given by the writer or the speaker is the only correct one and to cause him to accept the point of view expressed in the speech, essay or article not merely with logical argumentation, but through emotional appeal as well (the brainwashing function)" (Miššíková, 2003, p. 116).
She explains that the term "journalistic style" is used mainly in English. As the journalistic style "has developed a number of distinctive features involving both language and text organization, …some linguists tend to refer to them as journalese" (2003, p. 118).
Katnić-Bakaršić (1999) divides functional styles into primary and secondary. Primary styles include scientific, colloquial, administrative, publicistic, journalictic, and literary-artistic ones. To secondary styles she attributes oratorical, the style of advertisements and commercials, the style of comics, the style of essays, and the style of screenplays.
These were linguists' viewpoints; however, "the most important styles for journalism are newspaper and publicistic styles, though they do not cover all the varieties of messages accepted in journalism" (Panasenko, 2016, p. 52). Styles in journalism are connected with the messages' types: "journalism of rational type (analytical journalism), journalism of emotional type and on-line journalism. Journalism of rational type includes: brief news item, press report (parliamentary, of court proceedings, etc.), articles purely informational in character, investigative reportage, editorial, analysis, polemics, review and reflection, and journalistic research" (Pravdova, 2011, p. 71).
Journalistic style feature is connected with the type of a newspaper, because "there are many different types of newspapers, and newspapers include a variety of different genres" (Semino, 2009, p. 439).
All these texts, belonging to different styles, contain certain MMs: phonetic, grammatical, and LEXICAL. We use graphical means to visualize them in the texts below, using diverse fonts. By phonetic markers, we mean phonetic stylistic means, which can be found not only in speech, but in written texts as well. They are rhythm, rhyme, alliteration, assonance and onomatopoeia. Of course, they are mainly used in poetry, but in prosaic texts, the authors very often use them for stylistic purpose. Though modal words are mainly connected with objective modality, in some cases they show the speaker's attitude and can be considered as grammatical markers. LEXICAL MMs were the easiest for the identification in the text and in many fragments, the informants identified positive, negative or neutral speaker's attitude to the object to the addressee and to themselves. We will start with the examples from belles-lettres style (prose, poetry, and drama); then we will proceed to show how modality is used in journalism and to what end.

Modality in belles-lettres style
According to Galperin, belles-lettres style encompasses "emotive prose, or the language of fiction, the language of poetry, or simply verse and the language of drama" (1971, p. 255). Let us consider how subjective modality is expressed in different types of texts.
Prose. As we have mentioned above, Crystal writes about the author's individual style. We have analyzed texts by different authors, and it has become obvious that much depends on the genre the author uses and literary trend the author belongs to. The prose of Amerindian authors contains specific world perception (Volkova, 2018), thus we can find there many examples of MMs belonging to group A. The works by Iris Murdoch form the golden store of the so called intellectual prose and many a time have been in the focus of research (see., e.g., Tereshchenko & Tkachuk, 2019or Panasenko 2020. We have 50 processed text fragments, but in this article, we will limit ourselves only to three most vivid examples from Murdoch's novels. The first example. The attitude of Gideon to his sister Violet, who has been living for years in a dirty flat with piles of empty plastic glasses and plates everywhere, who seldom changed her clothes and washed her hair, is extremely negative. Here we may single out such MMs as irritation, indignation combined with decisiveness. The author uses graphic means to attract the reader's attention to the words you (logical stress), dowdy, which has negative evaluation and colour, because Violet's life, as well as her daughter's Tamar is grey, dull: "I WANT TO TRANSFORM TAMAR AND TO TRANSFORM YOU. I WANT TO SHAKE YOU BOTH AND CLEAN YOU UP AND dUST YOU dOWN AND dRESS YOU IN SMART BEAUTIFUL CLOTHES AND BRIGHT COLOURS. You're DOWDY, YOU'VE GOT NO SENSE OF COLOUR. I might even go into the dress designing business myself printing fabrics anyway. Violet, I'm serious.' (I. Murdoch, The Book and the Brotherhood, 2003, p. 316). In this case, to change colour for Gideon means to radically change sister's way of life and attitude to the surrounding. In this family situation, we have two different types of modality: B Speaker 1 (Gideon) → Addressee 2 (his sister Violet and a niece Tamar) -decisiveness, indignation and A Speaker 1 (Violet) → reality -total ignorance). In this example, we also have a case of alliteration, which we will comment on below.
The second example from this book. Violet's daughter, Tamar, had to interrupt her pregnancy. To show her great regret and suffering, the author uses words with a negative connotation, which we have marked in the text: "But the child was DEAD, or even WORSE, changed into A WICKED dEADLY dEMON, BLACK WITH RESENTMENT AND ANGER, living on as A HORRIBLE FILTHY GHOST, DEDICATED TO PUNISHING ITS MURDEROUS mother LETHAL to any other child who might, from that ACCURSED WOMB, succeed it and live" (I. Murdoch, The Book and the Brotherhood, 2003, p. 346). In this example, the lexical means of expressing MM prevail, combined with the modal verb might, which adds to the heroine's suffering reminding that she could have been a happy mom, but it did not happen: B Speaker 1 (Tamar) → Addressee 2 -her unborn baby; C Speaker 1 (Tamar) → Speaker 1 (Tamar) -regret, despair.
To understand the category of modality and to decode it properly in fiction, we must always take into account the text context. Let us consider one more example from Iris Murdoch's novel The Sea, the Sea. This fragment is a dialogue between Charles Arrowby, a retired actor, and his school love Hartley. He decides to save her from her despotic (in his mind) husband and kidnaps her. But Hartley is not happy to be locked up in his house. In this episode, we can identify different attitudes: Each text fragment is unique and means employed by the author in expressing different MMs vary. In some cases, negative MM is expressed lexically (dead, a wicked deadly demon, black with resentment and anger, horrible filthy, it hurts so much); with the help of synonyms (a murder, a killing) or with the help of so called consonantal phonostemes, the analysis of which was carried out by Margaret Magnus (1999), who claims that "the sounds in a word reflect more basic aspect of its meaning than does its referent" and attributes different meanings to different sounds. In her table, the first line of meaning the sound /d/ has, occupy such words, as 'end, death, sleep, drug', which have much in common with words in our text fragments: dust you down and dress, child was dead, or even worse, changed into a wicked deadly demon.

Poetry.
The poetic text has a structure of great complexity. It is highly informative and is associated with a complicated literary structure. In a relatively short text, a poet is to encode in a concise manner an enormous volume of information using a variety of means. These may include the use of paradoxical poetic forms (Marina, 2018), phonetic expressive means, such as rhyme and rhythm (Stashko, 2016;Zabuzhanska, 2017) and some others. In the poetic text, we may identify leading and background segments (sometimes we may come across their rhythmical interchange) or we may speak of the so called 'diffuse' modality uniting the whole text (Panasenko, 1985). Leading segments include many MMs; though they are more obviously seen in poetic texts, it is possible to identify them in prose, especially in plays. Out of 50 poems, we have chosen three, analysis of which we present below.
In the poem Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening by Robert Frost, we may identify such MM, as "confidence": A Speaker 1 → Object. The leading segments, which include lexical modal markers are 1, 3, 5, 6 and 7: 1 "Whose woods these are I THINK I KNOW. / 2 His house is in the village THOUGH, Here we have interesting combination of 'hindrances' in the narrative movement: I think I knowthough, The woods are lovely -But… The poem ends in two identical lines (full parallelism), which testifies to the seriousness of the speaker's intentions to complete the task he sets ahead, because he is sure that they will be done.

In the poem The Puzzled Game-Birds by Thomas Hardy (s.a.), text modality conveys confidence (B Speaker 1 → Addressee 2 and A Speaker 1 → Object -confidence + despair): THEY ARE NOT THOSE WHO USED TO FEED US / When we were young -they cannot be / These shapes that now bereave and bleed us? / THEY ARE NOT THOSE WHO USED TO FEED US, / For would they not fair terms concede us? / If hearts can house such TREACHERY / THEY ARE NOT THOSE WHO USED TO FEED US / WHEN WE WERE YOUNG -THEY cannot BE. This text has both lexical (THEY ARE NOT THOSE, BEREAVE AND BLEED US, THEY ARE NOT THOSE)
and grammatical (they cannot be, would, can) modal markers. The text loops back: the identical beginning and the ending (framing) show that the topic is closed like a ring and has no continuation.

R.L. Stevenson's Bright is the Ring of
Words is yet another good example of a poem exhibiting subjective modality. It has such lexical modal markers, as bright, fair opposed to dead and buried. The main MM is confidence (A Speaker 1 → Object -confidence); complementary -light sorrow: "BRIGHT IS THE RING OF WORDS / WHEN THE RIGHT MAN RINGS THEM, / Fair the fall of songs / When the singer sings them. / Still they are caroled and said / On wings they are carried -/ AFTER THE SINGER IS DEAD / AND THE MAKER BURIED." (In the Realm of Beauty, 1967, p. 40). The author uses inversion (Bright is…, On wings…, Fair the fall of songs… + ellipsis) and tautology When the singer sings them. Though this poem is about life and death, immortality of poetry and very often is called the testament, it is far from totally sad. The author uses polysyndeton in the second part of the poem to accentuate the eternal chain course of life, which is reinforced with emotionally charged words: …And when the west is red / With the sunset embers, / The lover lingers and sings And the maid remembers.
Drama. For our analysis, we have chosen 50 fragments from the plays by classical playwrights. Many of them have remarks of the author or stage directions, usually in brackets, e.g., rising impulsively, with a touch of brutality, with some doubt, languidly, gravely, frowning, astounded, which dictate to the actor or guide them how to act out and what feeling and attitude to convey.
The first example is Don Juan's monologue containing the MM "confidence A" (basic) and "curiosity A" (secondary), the leading segments emphasizing the confident attitude of the speaker are 2, 4, 6:  AND TORPEDOES IN IT" (G. B. Shaw Four plays, 1958, p. 37).
Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest has numerous examples of subjective modality. The dialogue between Gwendolen and Jack has the author's remark "astounded", which guides the actor how to mark the modality intonationally. Jack is surprised; punctuation marks show that there is a pause in his speech. Thus, here we have the combination of phonetic and lexical modal markers: A Speaker 1 (Jack) → Object -surprise + hope; B Speaker 1 (Gwendolen) → Addressee 1 (Jack) -love, hope; B Speaker 2 (Gwendolen) → Addressee 2 (Jack) -love, reproach; A Speaker 2 (Gwendolen) → Object -confidence: From the examples presented above, we see that subjective modality in belles-lettres style is expressed with the help of lexical, grammatical and phonetic markers. In plays, the author's comments guide the actor what intonation to use. It is the genre that dictates, which modal markers are to be chosen by the author to encode the information (s)he wants to convey to the reader/listener. In journalistic styles, the set of markers greatly depends on a number of factors, which will be regarded below.

Modality in journalistic styles
Though subjective modality in linguistics traditionally is understood as a category denoting the speaker's attitude towards the object or addressee, in journalistic styles it is often used as a tool of manipulation (Gnezdilova, 2017), when it is necessary to justify war or conflict (A Speaker 1 → Object), to create the image of the enemy (B Speaker 1 → Addressee) (Panasenko et al., 2017;Panasenko et al., 2018), or discredit a perceived opponent/opposition members (Kryachkov, 2005). Modality is widely used in newspaper style, namely in advertisements texts (Krajčovič & Čábyová, 2017).
First of all, we must say a few words about media texts. Misonzhnikov, e.g., writes that "the category of media text has recently become deeply integrated into socio-cultural, academic and professional contexts. It has acquired additional semantic shades that require proper identification due to their joint humanistic importance" (2011, p. 213).
In media texts, the category of modality is verbalized in a specific way. Modality greatly depends on the type of the journalistic message, which can belong to either emotive or rational journalism (for details see Panasenko, 2016 andPravdova, 2011). The next important subdivision of media texts is into written and oral ones, which belong to newspaper and publicistic styles. Online journalism has a great impact on media communication (Višňovský & Radošinská, 2017).
In oral texts (oratory, public speaking, etc.), the role of intonational means of expressing subjective modality is naturally essential (Alexiyevets, 2017). Misonzhnikov adds to this classification electronic media, which nowadays are on the rise thanks to the fact that "the technology of storing information, processing it and further transmitting it has improved greatly over the past century" (2011, p. 219). In our view, the border between these three types of text is very vague. Many newspapers have their own web sites, oratories are published in printed media or uploaded to the Internet and can be read, watched, and listened to.
Though the world expects from modern media "reliability, clearness, and consistency of coverage" (Misonzhnikov, 2011, p. 219), in reality, we have very well worked out techniques of text transformation leading to manipulation. If there is a conflict between states or people, various strategies of confrontation are used (Frolova, 2017, p. 177), e.g., "I AM SUPERIOIR -YOU ARE INFERIOR, I AM GOOD -YOU ARE BAD", i.e. B Speaker 1 → Addressee 1 -scorn, superiority, disdain. These linguo-cognitive schemes of strategy confrontation definitely have MMs in the text. If we consider George Bush's speech on Iraq he delivered in Cincinnati on October, 7 in 2002 (published by US news), we will spot numerous examples of subjective modality. In some cases, Iraq is accused of being the home of terrorism and a dangerous state possessing lethal weapons (A Speaker 1 → Object -extremely negative attitude): Knowing these realities, America must not IGNORE THE THREAT GATHERING AGAINST US. Facing CLEAR EVIDENCE OF PERIL, WE cannot WAIT for the final proof, THE SMOKING GUN that could COME IN THE FORM OF A MUSHROOM CLOUD. In this extract, we see lexical and grammatical modal markers. America, which is safe and strong, is opposed to Iraq, which is weak and dangerous. Here the speaker uses the substrategy of power demonstration: "DEMONSTRATE YOUR AUTHORITY AND POWER (accentuate your highest position and a lower position of the other)" (Frolova, 2017, p. 193): Members of Congress of both political parties, and members of the United Nations Security Council, agree that Saddam Hussein IS A THREAT TO PEACE AND must DISARM. We agree that the IRAQI DICTATOR must not BE PERMITTED TO THREATEN AMERICA AND THE WORLD WITH HORRIBLE POISONS AND DISEASES AND GASES AND ATOMIC WEAPONS. In this example, we see many lexical and grammatical markers expressing subjective modality: B Speaker 1 (Bush) → Addressee 1 (Saddam Hussein) -superiority and disdain.

Conclusion
Modality pertains to the process of forming reality concepts by a person, which takes place in the system of objective relations: economic, socio-political, moral, and ethical. At the same time in conveying attitudinal meanings, a person reveals themselves; they are characterized by their attitude towards society, towards people, towards a particular individual, as well as by an assessment of the behavior of other people and their own actions. All these relationships, which characterize the subjective, emotional world of personality, form the basis of subjective modality.
Modality as a text category has various markers: lexical, grammatical, and intonational (mainly in oral speech). These markers are specific in the texts belonging to different styles. We may distinguish three types of MMs: group A -speaker's attitude to the content of the speech, group B -speaker's attitude to the addressee; Group C -the attitude of the speaker towards themselves. In the texts under discussion, the first two groups prevail, though in the novels by Iris Murdoch, which abound in reasoning and inner monologue, we have found enough examples of Group C, i.e. attitude of the speaker towards themselves.
In dramatic and poetic texts, we may single out leading and background segments containing different MMs, which can be positive, neutral, and negative. It can be explained by rhythm as an important attribute of poetry and in plays, by the numerous dialogues, in which the interlocutors express their opinion, answer (unpleasant) questions and counter their enemies and rivals. In journalistic styles, newspaper and publicistic, it is important to take into account messages belonging to rational and emotional journalism, hard news and soft news. It is the journalistic genre (article, essay, journalistic research, reportage, interview, etc.), that dictates, which attitude towards the object of discussion or to the interlocutor to choose and, thus, what communicative strategies to employ. We have come across many examples of 'diffused' modality in media texts.