Ways of Expressing Probability in English in Thriller and Psychological Genres

Document Type : Research Article

Authors

Department of Theory and Practice of Teaching Foreign Languages, Kazan Federal University, Kazan, Russia

Abstract

This article focuses on how probability is expressed in the English psychological thriller genre. Specifically, it exposes the core and periphery of the functional-semantic field of probability in English, drawing on the work "Cari Mora" by Harris (2019). There are three levels to the functionality of a text: epistemic, deontonic, and dynamic. One of the primary modalities that determines this functionality is the modality of probability. It is argued that lexico-semantic, lexico-grammatical, syntactic, stylistic, and graphic means, with a preference for stylistic means, represent the core and the periphery of the functional-semantic field of probability at the explicit and implicit levels. The authors of the article examine the aforementioned levels of modality in relation to the lexical and stylistic characteristics of the English psychological thriller genre. The study's findings show that this fiction genre's language employs probability/improbability semantics on various levels to more accurately portray the protagonists' rational thoughts, emotions, and desires in addition to drawing the reader into a tense situation.

Keywords

Journal of Research in Applied Linguistics
Volume 14, Issue 3
Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Research in Applied Linguistics (ICRAL 2023), October 30, 2023, Kazan, Russia
October 2023
Pages 417-420

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