Deonticity and polyphony

a pragmalinguistic analysis of “obligar a + infinitive” in digital discourse

Abstract

Understanding modality as the speaker’s subjective attitude toward the enunciated content (Fuentes Rodríguez, 1991), this research focuses on deontic modality, characterized by notions of obligation and the negation of obligation (Neves, 1996), with a specific emphasis on analyzing and describing the periphrasis “obligar a + infinitive” in digital discourse. This construction is considered typically modal in both Portuguese and Spanish (Silva, 2004) and is investigated within the theoretical-methodological framework of Pragmalinguistics (Fuentes Rodríguez, 2000, 2013). As an analytical perspective, Pragmalinguistics views language use as conditioned by internal and external factors to discursive construction, as well as by the communicative actions of agents. It structures analysis across three levels - superstructural, macrostructural, and microstructural - and four discursive planes: enunciative, modal, argumentative, and informative. This study particularly highlights the relationship between the modal periphrasis “obligar a + infinitive” and polyphony, observed at the enunciative plane of the macrostructural level. For the qualitative-quantitative analysis, the Macrosintaxis del Español Actual 2.0 (MEsA 2.0) corpus, affiliated with the Argumentación y Persuasión en Lingüística (APL) research group, was used, with data collected through AntConc software. The modal construction was identified in all digital texts comprising the corpus, totaling 141 occurrences. The qualitative analysis followed the levels and planes proposed by Pragmalinguistics, emphasizing polyphony in the enunciative plane at the macrostructural level and its interaction with other categories. The Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) software supported this phase. Results indicate that in 120 cases (85.1% of the sample), the speaker employs a third-party voice to legitimize the discourse and prompt the proposed action, also influencing polarity and the deontic target at the microstructural level.