ve) when the writer of the autobiography refers to his/her past experience. It is used in story-telling, biography, autobiography, reports, eye-witnessing accounts, etc. and is especially useful for establishing the sequence of events. in the past is used to express an action in the past, the author had planned to undertake in future. It goes without saying that the autobiography is in the past tense form, and all the future actions, planned or unplanned are also used in the past tense forms.linguistic feature of the autobiographical genre is the frequent use of the modal verbs, which shows the writer s attitude towards his message. In the English language, a modal verb is an auxiliary verb, which can be used to change the modality of the sentence. The modal verbs are used in the past tense forms in autobiography, depending on the meaning they indicate. Some of them are:
Could indicates possibility or ability in the past. Could speculates about future possibilities.modals should/ought to indicate an obligation; for example, - My early readiness in learning to read, and the opinion of all his friends, that I should certainly make a good scholar.
Would introduces habitual actions in the past. It s used frequently in autobiographical genre. Would explains an action as a result of a supposed or real condition. next linguistic features are the textual categories, which are peculiar of this genre. Equally relevant to the issue are the questions of text analysis and its categories. It should be mentioned that the most characteristic of this genre is the category of retrospection.is a grammatical category of the autobiography. Retrospection within the process of its realization reactualizes certain parts of the autobiography. Actually, any text is based upon retrospection. While reading an autobiography the reader keeps in mind various portions of information, presented in the text, and from time to time he has to recall them to be able to understand and realize the certain development of the events. This process is purposive and is created by the author of the autobiography, as it is his will to force the reader to recall the facts which are to be actualized.we should point out that the communicative process is the attitude of the author of the utterance towards whatever is presented in his/her speech. This speech-creative process is termed as the category of modality. The subjective modality may be textual. In autobiography we can meet a lot of supraphrasal units which indicate a modal meaning. Since autobiography is a work about the narrator s ...
