Context independence and context dependence of the factuality verb function in English and Malay texts

• Main Author: Hashim, Siti Afifah
• Format: Conference or Workshop Item
• Language: English; English
• Published: School of Humanities, Universiti Sains Malaysia 2019
• Subjects: PE English
• Online Access: http://irep.iium.edu.my/79249/1/E-proceedings-Icllic-2019-Full.pdf; http://irep.iium.edu.my/79249/7/79249%20Context%20Independence%20and%20Context%20Dependence.pdf; http://irep.iium.edu.my/79249/; http://humanities.usm.my/images/proceeding/E-proceedings-Icllic-2019-Full.pdf

Language users often have difficulty in using appropriate verb inflections and modal auxiliaries to express factuality messages; messages that convey whether events are factual (Verb + s/zero inflection, e.g. He reads) or hypothetical in nature (Modal + Verb e.g. He will go). A good understanding of how to use these grammatical features is essential in order to communicate precise messages. Linguists and language analysts from all parts of the world are constantly conducting various studies, thinking of the best approach to teach/ learn languages. Perhaps, it is time for more attention paid to the language system itself - to explore more about the nature of the language and to find out how much context plays a role in providing relevant information and how these features differ from one language to another. This study is meant to discover if the Factuality verb function (i.e. how likely the event is to be) is supported by grammatical features; to see if the language users could just rely on the grammatical features alone to communicate Factuality information and if they also need to rely on context to communicate the needed information. For this study, 60 English texts and 60 Malay texts were analysed. The distributions of the contextually independent and contextually dependent verb features in both languages were examined. Inferential statistics was used to determine if statistically significant difference exists between the two languages in the use of the contextually independent and contextually dependent verb features. The findings showed that both English and Malay rely on grammatical features and context to convey Factuality messages.