Presentation

Mood, modality and modalization are the subject of lively debates both in linguistics and semiotics, in philosophy (one thinks in particular of research related to Souriau’s radical empiricism) and in sociology (especially with the work of Latour or Goffman as far as interactionist sociology is concerned). If mood determines the conditions of assertability of a linguistic proposition, modality, alongside temporality and aspectuality (TAM), influences the processes (doing) and states (being) of the different actors that make up an enunciative scene, particularly in terms of knowledge, will, and belief. Modalization, on the other hand, involves a rhetoric and a negotiation of acting that (re)structure and (re)distribute the modal charges among the actors of a narrative, among the participants in a practical scene (i.e. distribution of implication and commitment). This is the general theoretical basis of the reflection to which Pierluigi Basso Fossali, Marion Colas-Blaise and Julien Thiburce, who are co-directors of issue 13 of the journal Signata/Annals of Semiotics, Signata/Annals of Semiotics (2022 issue), invite you. In dialogue with other disciplines, the question of mood, modality and modalization is brought back to the forefront, with the desire to take stock after years of intense research on the subject in the field of semiotics and linguistics.

There are many avenues to explore. Thus, in what way is it relevant, on the one hand, to consider modality as a syntactic operator and to study its semantic scope, and, on the other hand, to evaluate its contribution to the (de)stabilization of an actantial scene? It will be interesting to follow the complex inter-modal arrangements, but also to ask how the modality can break away from dependence on the verb it serves, in favor of an “absolute” use. Going back to the valences, that is to say, to the values of the value and to the interpretative game, is it to give oneself the means to account for the sensitive and critical dimension of the modality, inasmuch as it is capable of reevaluating the very conditions of predication? Moreover, modalities open up not only to the rhetorical dimension of discourses, but also, more broadly, they can be conceived in relation to institutional environments and spaces, representations and norms, practices and praxis, media and supports. Finally, modalities can be thought in concert with modes (of existence or presence: real, actual, virtual, potential).

This issue of the journal aims to extend the field of analysis, often verbocentric, to other forms of semiosic manifestation, especially of the visual type. For example, in addition to the comparison between texts in different languages, it will examine the link between modalization and spatialization of images.

These avenues are developed in the extended argument. The contributions may be integrated into one or more of the following axes, or be of a transversal nature:

1. Modality and actantial scene: the role of modality in the management of relations between actors in a story and the negotiation of interacting roles.

2. • 1 “Enunciation” is used here for “utterance”.

   From the point of view of enunciation1, the articulation of linguistic modalities with sensory modalities (differences between the senses).

3. Modality and possible worlds.

4. Forms of modal experience.

5. From enunciative modalities to socio-anthropological modes of existence (Souriau, Latour…).

Practical information

• Proposals for papers (1 page) are due by September 10, 2020.

• Papers will be due in the last week of April 2021.

• Return to authors: June 2021.

• Return of final articles: last week of September 2021.

• Dossier published in Signata issue 13: February 2022.

Proposals for articles should be sent to: pierluigi.basso[at]univ-lyon2.fr; marion.colas[at]uni.lu; julien.thiburce[at]ens-lyon.fr

Instructions to authors: https://journals.openedition.org/signata/1163

Argumentation

Background

Modality is a classic theme in the language sciences and, in one way or another, each linguistic and semiotic theory has had to assign a place to its role, which is so obvious, in terms of manifestation, and so mysterious, given its deep semantic “nature”. It is often preferred to treat modality as a syntactic operator and leave it to philosophy to investigate its semantic depth. Indeed, its syntactic rection is frequently treated as a key to access its semantic scope, introducing, for instance, the idea that it functions as a “validation of representations”, a bit like the illocutionary force would concern the descriptive content of the proposition. This perspective helps to detect cases where the modal content is also conceived as a descriptive content—de re—, compared to the classical modality that implies an appreciation of the subject of the enunciation — de dicto modalities.

Yet another perspective would refuse to start the investigation from the function of the modality, in order to focus attention on the semantic differences between modalities, on their plurality and their polysemy. In this sense, the absolute use of a modal verb means the rejection of a servile role of the modality—it no longer depends on the discursive value of another verb—in order to assert an almost inextricable semantic density that seems affect all other uses: “I want”, “I can”, “I must”, etc., becomes an existential condition without immediate interpretant, without external explanation, such as “I perceive”. Modalities of being, one would say, but in reality we know that this “being” is immediately evaluated for its potential and the modality is precisely there not to validate a dissociation between being and doing.

With regard to the “nature” of modalities, there are several positions attested to in language sciences that have decided epistemologically to:

1. assume them as linguistic operators who do not need an interpretant from outside language itself, to the extent that their versatility or possible polysemy are merely a reflection of proven uses;

2. qualify them as logical operators that follow the propositional framework of discourse;

3. to link them to a thymic depth that becomes clearer thanks to them, thus structuring pathemic meaning effects in discourse.

We could speak of a kind of modal envelope that motivates intra-discursive modal strategies. This envelope may be the result of praxis, of internal norms within a given institutional space, of the media and supports that are used, of environmental factors, or even of a body that is resistant to linguistic and semiotic programming. Modalization is finally an influential model that “inhabits” the social space in the form of a network (integration of interests) and dissociative tension (cultural emancipation). Potentially, contiguity can already mean connivance (e.g., between an institutional representative and his/her spouse who is an entrepreneur), hence a rhetoric of distancing that functions as a propaedeutic to agreements and disagreements.

Therefore, modalization constitutes a critical archaeology of implicative links (e.g. informal commitments of the interacting parties) because, in its bare framework, it interrupts the immediate superimposition of institutionalized axiological readings. Basically, the mysterious character of modalities could be linked to their protosymbolic character, their influential modeling being almost an iconic suggestion, a primitive implication, but capable of imposing an interpretation of symbolic stakes on a scale that is enlarged and amplified by possible prefigurations (modal imaginary). Moreover, it should be remembered that, in semiotics, modalities have been linked to the description of the competence of the actants, and that the presence of a modal existence that cannot be inferred by presupposition from the performances produced has also been recognized. There is a modal reservoir that feeds: (i) alternative programming of action (even if they remain hypothetical); (ii) imaginary screenplays (dreams, etc.), (iii) hypotheses about other people’s states of mind (analogizations, empathy, etc.).

Modalizations open up the rhetorical dimension of discourses by activating a regime of reciprocal influence, or even potential polemology. Thus, they introduce contingency where their legitimate operations should follow devices and codes. As the typologization of modalities has been carried out, a similar operation should be done for modalizations. For example, with regard to transitive modalities, one could distinguish:

1. Activating vs. inhibiting modalities (on the conative level)

2. Unilateral vs. plurilateral modalities (on the agentive level)

3. Exclusive vs. participative modalities (on the distributive level)

4. Deliberate vs. unintended modalities (on the intentional level).

Departure

This issue of Signata aims to identify the advances in linguistics and semiotics on the notions of modality and modalization. The former seems to be at the heart of actantial determination by imposing a reciprocal structuring of being by doing and of doing by being, which gives the semiotic domain its specific capacity to hold together what exists and what is possible, determination and variation, appropriation and emancipation. Modality is the subtraction of semiotic from ontological—ontology would require that there should always be a “being” at the beginning of everything. As a kind of active clinamen on valences, the modality catalyzes a possible world, supports the linguistic operation that establishes the fictitious modeling of a reference plane to which to transplant issues, our projects of meaning: it is the vitalization of a cartography of signs, the index of the semiotic “respect” of the fact that in the beginning was action (Goethe), that the fundamental ecology of values is the implication of the transformative potential, activated or undergone.

Thus, we need modalization to provide this actantial landscape with a regime of reciprocal influences and constant perturbations, which are semiotically registered in terms of interacting tension and multiplication of points of view. Modalization gives actantial frameworks an inflection to the flow of information about the internal state of the actors involved, i.e. a dose of indeterminacy; the inheritance and the transfer of modal charges opening up to a diffraction of spaces of acquisition or accomplishment (possible worlds).

But there is another consequence that can be drawn: modalities cannot fail to turn into modality, sooner or later. At one time or another, a procedural text must guide the reader (and, in fact, every text has more or less obviously this ambition); one day or another, a theatrical staging will capture the conscience of a king. Between modality and modalization, there is the constitutive oscillation between semantics and pragmatics, of an illocution that cannot be meaningful without a hold, and of a perlocution that cannot recognize itself as “meaningful” without a structuring to which it remains coupled in order to escape the chaotic drift of its side effects.

On the one hand, modalization must also be studied at the textual level, as it is in charge of a dynamic (from a dynamicist perspective). On the other hand, a modality that manifests itself on the textual surface must be interpreted from a genre that indicates its relevance for an experiential or fictional setting.

Turning point

Being not excluded, the tracks of a historico-cultural reconstruction of modality as a notion or of a typological comparison between languages, however, cannot fully satisfy semiotics; the modal phenomenon manifests itself in non-verbal semiotic configurations and questions the relations between meaning and senses, the enunciative condition and the assertive claims of the utterance, the constant translations between the experiential and the linguistic, between semiotic configurations and institutional domains. Epistemology itself is a re-entry of the modal into the conditions of observation, modeling and understanding.

The problem of mood concerns the conditions and intentions of assertability; modality internalises these conditions within the utterance, with the idea of controlling their determination (hence lexicalization through modal verbs); modalization offers an explicit rhetorical competition to the inevitable distribution of modal charges between the actants of the utterance. These are the first solutions to quickly frame the modal question thanks to immediately detectable linguistic marks, but we must consider an aggravating factor: this lexicalization is also used on the metalinguistic level. As they are identifiable and already lexicalized entities, moods and modalities could be assumed as basic syntactic and semantic bricks, at risk. In this scenario, it would no longer be possible to question the configuration in which their semiotic potential emerges and becomes more precise. The extension of the modal to the totality of languages does not succeed in erasing “verbocentrism”; thus, the analysis of what is at the basis of the semantic content of the modality remains evasive, and the expressive forms of its non-lexical manifestations remains an analogical suggestion.

Thus, a series of questions come to the attention of researchers, where “semiotic” manifestations also questions the certainties of “linguistic” realizations. To organize these questions, we can try to distinguish instrumentally between different axes and approaches, in order to face an exploration that could find its own integration through the different contributions of the issue.

Axes

(I) The first axis corresponds to an approach that treats enunciation as a configuring activity (scriptwriting): modality is then captured as a qualification of the actors’ commitment in the transformation of values taken up by the enunciative framework. Qualifying passages can be distinguished: from clinamen (modalizing contingency) to intentional modalization (modal imaginary), to effectual modalization (by intervention, with mediations; by simple unthought physical opposition of our body), to end with figural modalization (in a fictional world).

(II) The second axis fosters an approach that observes the modality as emerging in the very scene of enunciation. In this perspective, the description of modalities must do without the use of modal verbs and other coded forms of manifestation, in order to apprehend modalities as instances that participate in the configurating activity and that manage to structure scenes and scenarios endowed with semantic consistency and transformative tension. This approach must necessarily be positioned where sensory modalities (differences between the senses) and linguistic modalities are articulated.

(IV) According to a fourth axis, the approach can focus on the modal experience in chained and embedded pragmatic scenarios. The particularity of this approach lies in an intransitive appreciation of the modal, which no longer participates in the determination of the scenarios, and therefore in a coagulation of meaning, to the benefit of a fluidification of tensions (attractions, repulsions, interferences, etc.). We can then recognize an existential prosody (modulation), an event rhythm (modal scansion) and phrasing in the productive initiatives (modal partition).