Phraseology and Culture in English

7. Conclusion 
The study of modality clusters in a corpus of spoken English has illustrated 
that, in the case of the two clusters that have been discussed, they display a 
particular meaning that does not directly equate to the sum of their individ-
ual parts. Instead of enforcing the modal properties of the individual parts, 
both sequences display a pattern of meaning that is in opposition to the use 
of their respective composites. This observation gives supportive evidence 
to Hoye’s (2005: 1502) argument that the investigation of modality in Eng-
lish “[…] is not simply a matter of creating an inventory of modal tokens – 
adverbs, adjectives, lexical verbs, prosody, and so forth – but of exploring 
how and when modal expressions combine in discourse, why they do, why 
speakers exploit the modal system the way they do, and what underlying 
cognitive mechanisms and motivations are for their choices within such an 
elaborate system.” 
The result of this study has relevance for research on politeness and in-
directness, as well as for the teaching of modal markers. The accumulation 
of modal markers does not necessarily increase the level of politeness, nor 
does it add to the indirectness of certain speech acts. Rather, such sequences 
need to be studied in their own right by consulting a corpus of spoken dis-
course to ascertain whether any other meaning may arise based on their co-
occurrence.

---

Definitely maybe: Modality clusters and politeness in spoken discourse 
269
8. Acknowledgements 
Part of the background to this paper was presented at the Annual Meeting 
of the British Association of Applied Linguistics in 2004. The comments 
from the audience have greatly helped to shape the analysis and discussion 
of the data presented in this study. I am also grateful to Ronald Carter for 
feedback on an earlier version of this paper.