Ways of Increasing the Communicative Dynamics of Epistemic Utterances
The article explores means of increasing the degree of communicative dynamism of the qualitative component in epistemic utterances in modern English. The work is based on the concept of functional communicative grammar and is illustrated by examples from the British National Corpus (BNC) and the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). The author argues that the mechanism of enhancing the dynamism of an epistemic utterance is rhematisation of epistemic modality operators. It is shown that rhematisation of modal operators is carried out in different ways and with varying degrees of intensity.