Hedging in deontic statements (on the material of German and Russian languages)

Abstract

Тhe article examines ways and means of reducing the categoricalness of the deontic statement. The analysis is carried out based on the corpora of national languages, Russian and German. The nuclear equivalent of a deontic utterance in German and Russian is a deontic construction consisting of the obligatory components such as a deontic marker/predicate; an infinitive of a semantic verb denoting an action aimed at changing the situation; the deontic subject, or potential performer, of a required action as well as various optional components. The study focuses on figuring out the components of the deontic construction involved in reducing the categoricalness of the deontic utterance. The study shows that the interconnection of deontics and epistemics in the deep structure allows explicating the putative mode of deontic utterances for speaker’s pragmatic tasks. Based on the corpus data, it systematizes the means of marking the epistemic modus of a deontic statement. It reveals optional components marking fuzziness and indicating the uncertainty of necessity, which include temporal markers and quantifiers as well as various evaluative indicators contributing to communicative cooperation and creating a positive image of the speaker. It describes the semantic types of the deontic subject involved in the creation of the indefiniteness of the statement. The study addresses the role of the deontic source explication in reducing categoricalness. It reveals the role of the deontic performative in hedging the introductory message, which due to the performative formula is marked as informationally significant.