Modalities as Persuasion Carriers in Political Discourse
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper explores the persuasive weight of modalities as presidential meaning carriers in Egyptian political discourse. More specifically, it probes the extent to which modalities, which are linguistically manifested in obligation modals and need-statements, go beyond their ordinary semantic function of communicating obligation and commitment towards further persuasive functions that target the successful communication of particular presidential meanings in one of President El-Sisi’s speeches. Two research questions are addressed in this study: first, to what extent are modalities employed as persuasion carriers in El-Sisi’s speeches? Second, what are the presidential meanings carried by modalities in the selected data? The paper theoretically draws on various approaches to the concept of modality and its categorization. The study reveals two main findings: first, modalities in El-Sisi’s speech go beyond their ordinary semantic function towards further pragmatic purposes that target the influence of the addressees’ cognitive background in a way that serves to confirm specific existing beliefs or to change them totally to adopt the persuader’s views. This, in turn, accentuates this paper’s assumption that modalities are persuasion strategies with a speaker-benefit-oriented goal of communicating particular intended meanings. Second, in political speeches, modalities are often accompanied with other lexical and grammatical categories to intensify the persuasion process. The study recommends further discussions of grammatical categories other than modality, such as pronouns, to show their significance as persuasion strategies in political and critical discourse studies.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".