The semantic aspects in the expression of volitive modality in Pope Francis's speeches in Spanish language

Abstract

This work aims to discuss the semantic aspects involved in Pope Francis' speeches in Spanish language. For this, we take as a basis the theoretical framework of the Functional Discourse Grammar (FDG) of Hengeveld and Mackenzie (2008) with regard to the volitive modality, which is related to what is (un)desirable. To this end, we selected 13 speeches made by the Holy Father on an apostolic trip to Spanish-speaking countries (Cuba, Mexico, Bolivia, Ecuador and Paraguay) and of strong Hispanic concentration (The United States). After analyzing the corpus and interrelating the data using SPSS, we concluded using the Chi-square test (≤0.05) that there is an interrelation between the semantic categories, in which the volitional modal values conditioned only the Mode; while the source and the target of the volitional modal attitude conditioned both Tense and Mode.