Expressing judgement about what one says is accomplished with modalities. Even if modalities are considered as a primarily linguistic phenomenon (e.g. semantically inscribed in particular lexemes or inferred from uttered propositions), the parameters required for determining modality cover all traditional fields of linguistics and can easily be considered to be a complex system. In this chapter, we reveal aspects of this system that have not yet been taken into account but that indicate a

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... r's emotion and thus bear modality, such as the iconic pictograms that represent mimics or gestures in the case of chat conversations over written, (a)synchronous, on-line communication. I argue that in addition to utterance level and speech turn modalities, linguists should include modalities at the level of exchanges. I illustrate a complex system that is a non-linear and unpredictable succession of (in)validations of ex/implicit contents, marked by different semiotic systems that relate to each other while determining subsequent turns of speech.