Phraseology and Culture in English

Definitely maybe: Modality clusters
and politeness in spoken discourse 
Svenja Adolphs 
1. Introduction 
Over the past thirty years there has been a substantial interest in cross–
cultural and cross-linguistic comparisons of politeness routines and mark-
ers (House and Kasper 1981; Blum-Kulka and Olshtain 1984; House 
1996). The linguistic realisation of “hedges” or “downtoners” has been 
particularly well explored. Yet, previous research has either focused on the 
comparison of individual lexical items which are often modal in nature 
(Bublitz 1978), or taken a “macro-perspective” in analysing speech acts 
and events (Brown and Levinson 1987). However, recent studies, espe-
cially in the field of corpus linguistics, indicate that the unit of meaning 
frequently extends beyond the individual lexical item and that certain clus-
ters combine to perform describable functions in a language (Sinclair 
1991, 1996; Wray 2002). Using, as a basis, a five million word corpus of 
spoken English, this study attempts to bring together the two research 
traditions by exploring the conventionalisation of modality clusters, such 
as might just or could possibly.
2. Modality markers and politeness 
According to Simpson (1993: 47), “modality refers broadly to a speaker’s 
attitude towards, or opinion about, the truth of a proposition expressed by a 
sentence.” As such, modality markers have the function of “shading” cate-
gorical assertions. There are a number of frameworks and terminologies 
which define this over-arching function further, resulting in categories such 
as discourse-oriented modality (Palmer 1975), epistemic and root modality 
(Coates 1983), as well as boulomaic and perception modality (Simpson 
1993). However, for the purpose of this paper I shall refer only to the fol-
lowing two categories: deontic and epistemic modality. The former is re-
lated to the degree of obligation entailed in a proposition, while the latter is 

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concerned with the level of commitment towards the truth of a proposition 
(Simpson 1993). 
Linguistically, modality is mostly realised through modal auxilliaries, 
modal lexical verbs and modal adverbs. Such markers of modality have 
also been discussed within pragmatic analyses of indirect and polite speech 
acts. House and Kasper (1981), for example, compare the frequency of 
politeness markers within complaints and requests in a corpus of elicited 
situations in German and English. They distinguish between eight forms for 
realising a speech act, some of which rely on the use of modal items for 
their inclusion into a particular category (e.g. “hedged performative”). 
With advances in corpus linguistics, the past two decades have also seen 
a number of corpus-based analyses of selected modal markers. Coates 
(1983) draws on the Lancaster-Oslo/Bergen (LOB) corpus and the Survey 
of English Usage (SEU) to distinguish different meaning senses of modal 
items, and Farr and O’Keeffe (1996) examine the use of the item would as a 
hedging device in the Limerick Corpus of Irish English. Möllering (2001) 
studies modal particles in corpora of spoken German, and Barron (2003) 
carries out a longitudinal study of the acquisition of German modal items as