Abstract
<jats:p>The aim of the study is to establish the modal-illocutionary status of epistemic disagreement. The article examines the characteristics of subjective epistemic modality and outlines a communicative-pragmatic perspective for its analysis in relation to disagreement. The scientific novelty of the study lies in the conceptual interpretation of disagreement as an illocutionary act that realizes subjective epistemic modality, as well as in the shift of the analytical focus from the description of the form and function of the responding utterance to the object of disagreement, namely the proposition and its epistemic status. Disagreement is regarded as an illocutionarily structured result of epistemic re-evaluation of propositional content, which fundamentally distinguishes the proposed understanding of disagreement from its interpretations as a universal pragmatic reaction or as a modal category, within which the connection between epistemic modality and the illocutionary structure of the utterance remains insufficiently conceptualized. As a result of the study, based on English-language fragments from editorials, the conditions for the emergence of epistemic disagreement are clarified, and it is demonstrated that epistemic disagreement is realized as an illocutionary response to propositions endowed with an epistemic status. It is established that the nature of the propositional content, the degree of its interpretive indeterminacy, as well as explicit and implicit epistemic marking determine the possibility of epistemic re-evaluation of the proposition in a situation of disagreement, thereby contributing to a more precise theoretical specification of the status of epistemic disagreement within the system of modal meanings and the structure of speech action.</jats:p>