| The notion of modality derives from Aristotle.It has been a continuous study which interested many logicians,philosophers and linguists.Modality is a means as the expression of subjective judgment,and as the expression of the speaker's opinions and attitudes.Therefore,the research on modality has become a heated topic.Since different linguists have made many researches on modality from different perspectives,at present, there is not a unanimous modality theory in academic field.Halliday's Systemic-Functional Grammar presents a more detailed statement on modality theory. According to Halliday,modality is a subsystem of mood system,realizing the interpersonal meaning of language,which is a means of performing the interpersonal function.Recent years,with the appearance of corpus,people pay more attention to combining modality with different genres in virtue of corpus research,which promotes the development of modality research.Based on Longman Spoken English corpus and Written English corpus,Biber et al.(2000) have investigated the usage of modal operators in six different genres:British novel,American novel,Academic text,British English discourse,American English discourse and news text.At home,some researchers,such as Shude Qiu,Xinzhang Yang,have made a detailed analysis on modality combining academic,legal and other texts.Until now,there are not enough researches on modality system,which can combine modality with text in virtue of corpus.Based on the samples selected from New York Times,this thesis tries to make a detailed study on news text under the framework of Halliday's Systemic-Functional Grammar.It mainly analyzes the modality system from the perspective of type,value, orientation and polarity and explores the interpersonal function of modality in news text. In this thesis,both quantitative and qualitative analyses are adopted.Furthermore,with the help of corpus and computer software,the thesis aims to discover the characteristics of modality's interpersonal function and also attempts to provide some related explanations from different perspectives,which deepens people's understanding of news text.By making the research,the author finds out that,in news text,modalization expressions are more than modulation ones;modal expressions of median value take the predominant role in the value perspective;orientation is mainly achieved by objective and implicit expressions;positive expressions are more than negative ones.All these researches will make a great contribution to Chinese educators and learners' understanding of modality system,which will help people master the interpersonal function of modality in different texts. |
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