Linguistic Manifestation of Modality in Dul Johnson's Across the Gulf

Abstract

The novels by Dul Johnson have been populated in the largest part by reviews that provide valuable, informative and critical summary of the texts as well as evaluate his prowess as a writer by considering his creative ability to foreground pertinent issues in the Nigerian social, political, economic and religious space. However, the few studies on the language of these novels have focused more on their general stylistic features and some aspects of their pragmatic underpinnings than on the discourse significance. Thus, this study, analyzes the discourse roles of linguistic modality in Dul Johnson's Across the Gulf. Twenty (20) excerpts from the text were purposively chosen and examined using Simpson's (1993) conceptual framework on linguistic modality. The intention is to identify the categories of modality used in the text, their discourse functions as well as the core themes which they have been used to convey. The different types of modality that were discovered include deontic modality, to communicate anxiety, frustration, and rejection; buolomaic modality, to signal supplication, expectation, and tendency; epistemic modality, to relay information, resolution, and realization; and perception modality, to express assumption, evaluation, and deduction. The author used modality as a discourse technique to highlight the major themes of betrayal, fate, deceit, murder, infidelity, and the quest for identity. Modality depicts the real state of the Nigerian society fictionalized in the text. This study advances knowledge on the English modal verbs and offers a framework for understanding the meaning of literary dialogue.