MODALNOŚĆ EPISTEMICZNA W USTNYCH WYPOWIEDZIACH MATURZYSTÓW
Epistemic modality in secondary school graduates’ spoken utterances

Summary/Abstract: In this article the author analyses components of the epistemic modality, by means of which a student assesses the accuracy of views presented during the oral matriculation examination in the Polish language. Considering the specificity of spoken utterances during the oral matriculation examination, the epistemic modality can be defined as all kinds of information on an intellectual attitude of the speaker who, on the basis of his/her own knowledge and thinking processes which are taking place in his/her mind at a given moment, makes a “gradable” assessment of a view’s reliability. The analysed texts differ depending on the level of certainty of their authors as far as the communicated content is concerned and they can be divided into two basic groups: 1) utterances containing markers of a modal certainty function and 2) utterances with markers of a modal probability function and possibilities which are much more numerous in the examined material. The fact of highlighting the hypothetical nature of views by secondary school graduates comes from a specific asymmetry between an examinee and an examiner, non-equivalence not only of the played social roles but also of areas of knowledge between the speaker and the recipient. The assumption that the examiner knows more results in the fact that students increase the distance to the views which they communicate, what seems to be rather unfortunate because the uncertainty in relation to their own utterances does not favour achieving the recipient’s acceptance or support for the communicated views and this is one of the aims of an argumentative utterance.

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