The Category of Modality. Cognitive Approach. The Psycho/Neurolinguistic Substrate

In traditional sense, in the act of communication, the modality category marks the position of the speaker in relation to himself, the listener and the emitted content, constituting a complex set of interdependent relationships between the speaker (transmitter) and the listener (receiver), which might endanger the message-code relationship in human communication. The material investigated in the present approach allows the possibility to distinguish the attitude of the speaker, perceived as a reaction to external stimuli, thus gaining both rational and irrational support, able to reveal some latent processes of consciousness. The reported ones, both psycho-linguistically and socially, mentally or emotionally, allow the possibility to outline an integral image of the speaking subject, manifesting one’s own vision upon a certain situation, from the perspective of the individual – ontic realities – reasoning – reaction. The modality, a distinctive mark within the structure of a statement, is endowed with a purely subjective imputation, a decisive fact for an extensive investigation of the phenomenon in question, a position fully adopted in the present article. The conceptual ambiguity of the modality continues to generate various interpretations and dissensions in the content-expression context, and, as a whole, regarding the language-speech or language-thinking dichotomies. Representing one of the linguistic universals, the mentioned category is circumscribed to multiple fields related to cognitivism, namely: logic, philosophy of language, psychology, having tangents with psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics, which, in modern linguistics, imposes new directions of investigation of those factors involved in the communication process.