The potential of linguosynergetic discourse analysis in the study of the modus category of evidentiality (based on the material of the English language)

Abstract

The article considers the modus category "evidentiality", which determines the authorship of the statement, the source, as well as the nature of the transmitted information. The purpose of the study is to substantiate the methodology of linguosynergetic discourse analysis of this category. The research material was 1,500 English-language discursive contexts from media texts posted on the website of the British magazine "The Economist" for 2021-2023. The scientific novelty of the research consists in the development of a methodology for the analysis of evidentiality, which provides the possibility of a holistic and comprehensive study of its functioning in media discourse by determining the evidential discursive context, studying its subjective perspective and situational-speech component, conducting linguistic-synergetic modeling, developing an algorithm for interpreting the desired model, considering evidentiality as a link between the subject (author) and the object (the addressee/reader) of the passage. As a result of the conducted research, it was found that the proposed comprehensive methodology integrates all the main approaches to the study of discourse structures. The use of this technique is relevant for the study of discourse ‘per se’, regardless of the language or genre and stylistic affiliation of the material. In addition, the methodology of linguosynergetic discourse analysis can be used to study and describe other modal categories.