TYPOLOGICALLY COMMON CHARACTERS OF MODALITY IN MARITIME DOCUMENTS

Abstract

This article examines the peculiarities of modal-emotional connotations used in English-language texts in maritime documents, the functional and semantic characteristics of subjective modality units (epistemic, axiological, aletic and deontic) are studied. The results of the research based on the material of maritime-related documents showed that despite the fact that the main distinctive characteristics of the documents include the presence of factual (cognitive) information, the monosemantics of the used terms and distinct content of the text, the author’s personal attitude to the researched problem, his individual characteristics of speech and personality often appear in the texts of the documents. Moreover, the emotional and modal characteristics of the analyzed texts, their orientation, do not in any way interfere with the cognitive semantics of the text. Despite the fact that modal values are subject to the pragmatic task of the work, the goal, which is dedicated to one topic, and the clear structure of presenting the research results, the functional and semantic side of documentary texts is formed not only at the expense of the objective component, but at the expence of the subjective one too. That is why syntactic (parallel constructions emphatic word order, constructions with interjections and with the meaning of intellectual assessment) and morphological (perfect / imperfect verb forms), stylistic (epithets, comparisons) are widely used alongside with lexical means of expression. Some features of the content structure of the work are related to national or cultural peculiarities. An absolutely isomorphic feature of the compared scientific works is that the methods, techniques and manner of language communication is closely connected with the features of the person’s speech, his professional style and his individuality. Explicit presentation of modal meanings strengthens the emphasis on the importance of the introduced information