Modal Egocentrics Used by Belarusian Journalists

Abstract

This article analyzes media texts by a journalist from the Belarusian newspaper “Zvyazda”, selected from the “Society” section for the year 2025. A comparison of publications by various authors during this period revealed that it is in Alena Kravets’s writing that the communicative category of egocentrism manifests itself most frequently and explicitly. The narrative speaker is identified by verbal units that indicate the characteristics of their idiostyle. The main objective of this study is to identify and analyze productive egocentric expressions belonging to the category of modality, specifically authorial modality. The present study is based on a linguopragmatic approach to the analysis of media texts in the informational genres of news briefs and reviews. A distinctive feature of the selected author’s written discourse is their use of metatextual elements at the logical level. The statistical method allows us to assert that the author most frequently uses speech constructions that facilitate the inclusion of additional information within a series of listed events or on which the reader’s attention is focused, thereby expressing the author’s attitude toward them. The systematic use of certain modal egocentrics depends on the narrative speaker’s intentions, their choice of strategies and tactics for conveying information, and, likely, on the genre organization of the texts, which in turn contributes to the formation of the author’s idiostyle—that is, it constitutes a key feature of this speech subject’s self-presentation. Furthermore, the use of modal egocentrics in a specific media genre influences changes in their grammatical function, in particular leading to a transformation of their part of speech.

Funding

This work was carried out as part of the VEGA 1/0456/25 project, "The Anthropocentric Paradigm of Text Pragmatics as Discourse" (01/2025–12/2028).

Received 10 January 2026

Revised 18 May 2026

Accepted 6 June 2026

For citation: Kalechyts, A., 2026. Modal Egocentrics Used by Belarusian Journalists. Slavic World in the Third Millennium, 21 (1–2), pp. 186–202. https://doi.org/10.31168/2412-6446.2026.21.1-2.11