Mass-media text persuasive function: evidentiality and epistemic modality

The source of information, the sphere of knowledge initiating (evidentiality) and the speaker's judgment correlating the utterance proposition with the actual reality (epistemic modality) alongside with the illocutionary force of the initiated utterance turn out to be functional characteristics which determine the speaker's position in the current mass-media discourse. The category of evidentiality focuses on the linguistic coding of the information source and possesses the propositional expression. Moreover, definite types of evidential meaning among them the implicit ones relate to the estimation of the speaker's proposition. As a result, this category is interrelated with the modality. In mass-media text the predicates introducing the report are widely used as evidential markers, which don not only indicate the source of the information covered, but also manifest the actual opinion on the situation which is the text topic. This kind of predicates can reflect the journalist's evaluation of both the direct and implicit source of information. The latter case as our observations show is the frequent way of realizing the categories of evidentiality and epistemic modality in the mentioned text. In implementation of the predicates analyzed all language functions are actively manifested - nominative, interpretive, cognitive, modal and evaluative, communicative. Under the cognitive approach the basic language functions are considered in the speech communication dynamics. This kind of predicates fully realizes the communicative language function. The communication function is immediately presented in the minimal communication unit, i.e. speech act. The speech actions are considered to be the communication intention basics and the intentional field base as well.