Modality and Evidentiality in English: A Semantic-Pragmatic Analysis of Speaker Stance and Information

Abstract

Modality and evidentiality are two similar semantic categories by which English speakers’ express attitude and knowledge about the propositions they express. Modality conveys possibility, necessity, obligation, and permission in various degrees, and evidentiality indicates the origin and/sentiment of the information presented. This article reviews recent scholarship (2019-2026) to re-evaluate the theoretical links between these two categories in English and looks at their functioning in authentic discourse (both academic texts, news reports, and political speeches). The study takes a qualitative approach to research, based on documents, and examines studies on modality and evidentiality that rely on a corpus, discourse analysis, and typological analysis, as well as those from the foundational frameworks that have been offered by earlier researchers like Palmer, Bybee, Aikhenvald and others. The review demonstrates that English does not have an obligatory grammatical evidential system, but instead its speakers and writers use a wide range of lexical and syntactic evidential devices, mostly modal auxiliaries, evidential adverbs and reporting verbs, at times merging both the two functions into one expression. The discussion also demonstrates that these patterns are sensitive to register, genre and communicative context: hedging is increased in times of collective uncertainty, evidential marking is systematic in spoken and written academic discourse and second language writers show over- and under-use patterns when compared to first language writers. The article finds that modality and evidentiality are analytically separable but functionally dependent systems that continue to be influenced by new contexts of discourse, such as news texts in the pandemic era, political communication, and texts produced by artificial intelligence, and that future research should strive for larger and more varied corpora and for cross-linguistic comparison for a more detailed and nuanced theoretical picture.