Studying Modality Based on Palmer’s Theory in Three Stories of Shahnameh: Fereydun’s Monarchy, Battle of Rostam and Esfandiyar, and Yazdegerd’s Monarchy

Modality is a semantic and grammatical category for the demonstration of the realis and irrealis worlds. It is the expression of speakers’ beliefs and mental realities on the proposition and its content evaluation. Palmer divides modality into ‘propositional modality’ and ‘event modality’. The propositional modality includes two modes of ‘epistemic’ and ‘evidential’, and the event modality consists of ‘deontic’ and ‘dynamic’ modes. Every language uses various grammatical and semantic modal operators in transforming concepts. In the present study, we investigated the linguistic modal structures and markers as well as the meaning and context in the three stories of Shahnameh (i.e. Fereydun’s Monarchy, Battle of Rostam and Esfandiyar, and Yazdegerd’s Monarchy) based on Palmer’s theory. Different modes of modality include speculative, assurance, conditionals, all types of reports, necessity, commissive and threat, wishes and fears, presuppositions, interrogative and negative statements, implication and assertion in the structures like perceptual and cognitive verbs, prepositions, adjectives, adverbs, allusion, and in the sentences expressing a general and acceptable concept such as idioms. Here, considering the setting is very important in conveying concepts of modality. The linguistic devices in these three stories are divided into three groups based on their frequencies: verbs (56%); nouns, adjectives, and adverbs (27%); and prepositions (17%).