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Modality Analysisa Semantic Grammar For Imputations Of Intentionality In Texts, Carl W. Roberts, Cornelia Zuell, Juliane Landmann, Yong Wang

Department of Sociology Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Modality analysis is a text analysis methodology that affords comparisons of how people from distinct cultural contexts differ in their accounts of why one or more of their numbers find specific activities possible, impossible, inevitable, or contingent. The technique is built around a two-part semantic grammar, the application of which involves the identification of modal clauses in texts, the classification of these clauses according to their modal forms, and the identification of rationales associated with the clauses' modalities. We show that with sufficient training the method affords high interrater agreement. After providing a few tips on data-collection strategies, results are …