Abstract

A number of studies have assessed the expression of modality in natural languages. However, most of these studies have been done in languages like English, French, Japanese, Swedish, and Korean etc. No study has been conducted on modality in any Malawian local language. The aim of this study was to find out if modality is expressed in Chichewa editorials. Chichewa is Malawi’s de facto national language. A total of 25 editorials ‘Ndemanga’ were analysed to establish the expression of modality in Chichewa editorials. It was found that modality is expressed in Chichewa as is the case with other natural languages mentioned above. It was observed that the expression of modality in Chichewa editorials is done both subjectively and objectively. It was also found that modality in Chichewa editorials is in different categories and these are deontic, epistemic, volitive/boulomaic and dynamic modality. In some cases different categories of modality are expressed in a single clause and this study describes such a situation as combined modality. The study further discovered that there are different functions of modality and these include persuasion, directive function and manipulation. It was noted that the modal verbs, modal adverbs, modal adjectives and modal auxiliaries are not used in isolation but together with the affixes such as subject, tense, object and negative markers. This is due to the agglutinative nature of Chichewa language. The study also found out that some systemic choices are made in the course of expressing modality in Chichewa editorials. It can be concluded that modality is expressed in Chichewa as is the case in other natural languages and that editorial writers make use of this linguistic aspect to establish favourable or unfavourable bias and thereby manipulate their reader’s opinion.

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School	: School of Arts, Communication and Design
Issued Date	: 2016

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