WHEN REFORMULATION IS REMODALIZATION WITH ATTENUATION EFFECT

Abstract

From a functional point of view, reformulation is metadiscursive (Briz, 1998). The metadiscursive control over the production of meaning implies a cooperative behavior on the part of the speaker motivated by the desire to clarify possible misunderstandings and to overcome communication obstacles. This is the reason why it can often have an attenuation effect. Besides the discursive dimension, the reformulation also has a semantic status. In the activity of enunciating reformulation operates within a relation of pertinence between "the saying" and "the wanting to say".

The approach here proposed is based in the theory of predicative and enunciative operations (TOPE), according to which to enunciate is first of all a process that is reconstructed from the utterance as a chain of forms. In other words, the utterance is the product of operations of different orders determination. Also according to this theoretical framework, the modalization of any utterance is one of these orders of enunciative determination. The predicative relation (or propositional content), with respect to the degree and to the way the subject enunciator validates it, is determined through the operations that underlie modalization. That’s why the study of the modalization includes the phenomenon of the remodalization, which consists of "passing from one modal value to another different modal value, focusing two or more modalization operations on the same predicative relation. The second operation deconstructs the value constructed by the former. "(Campos, 1997: 158)

The observation of occurrences of reformulation in which remodalization presents a discursive effect of attenuation leads to a formal description of the operations underlying these phenomena, showing that they have to do with different levels of language functioning even if they paradigmatically evidenciate a relation of theoretical interdependence. Thus, we intend to demonstrate how it is possible to describe certain cases of attenuation as a construction of a second modal value, situated on the scale of assertive values and in a relation with a first modal value, the one reformulated. Therefore, rather than overlapping one the other, the phenomena of reformulation, remodalization and attenuation are in a relation of interdependence, compromising the boundaries that dictate the traditional domains of the functioning of language: the discursive, the pragmatic, the grammatical.