Abstract

Modality encodes speakers or writers’ attitudes towards, and evaluations of, people and states of affairs. These evaluative attitudes are often ideologically motivated. This paper investigates ideology as carried by modal expressions in Salmon Fishing in the Yemen. Of the ten genres constituting the narrative, the newspaper articles have been selected for analysis. The paper adopts Simpson’s (1993) analytical framework, aka Critical Linguistics, in order to achieve three objectives. It aims to identify the modal expressions employed in the selected newspaper articles, classify the relevant modalized, and modally unmarked, statements, and explore the ideological assumptions and evaluations generated by the modal expressions, or their absence, in relation to the characters’ attitudes towards each other and towards the thematic developments in the novel. Analysis uncovers a dichotomy constructed between the East and West. The East, represented by the salmon project, Sheikh Muhammad and the Yemeni government, is projected as submissive and inferior.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.