A Contrastive Study Of Modality In Chinese And American News Personal Commentary

This thesis aims to describe and explain the microcosmic differences in the use of English modality in Chinese and American News personal commentaries. By analyzing the microcosmic differences, native use of modality is synthesized to afford some clue to English modality teaching represented by modal verbs in the elementary English education period. The theoretical framework adopted in the study is related research on modal type, orientation and value in Functional Grammar and the theory of culture influencing language use.Scholars at home and abroad have done a lot of research into modality. In early times, Palmer makes a comprehensive analysis of English modality and modal verbs in his book Modality and the English Modals (1979). After modality research is applied to specific register, focus shifts from the controversy over classification of modality to the interpersonal meaning of modality. In Functional Grammar modality is viewed as the important realization of interpersonal meaning by Halliday(1994) as well and he points that modality refers to "the speaker's judgment of the probabilities, or the obligations, involved in what he is saying". Research on modality becomes more and more systemic ever since then.With the development of corpus linguistics, research into modality focusing on specific discourse makes remarkable progress. Discourse referred to in the previous research covers medicine, law, advertising, academics and politics and so forth. For example, Bybee does research on the development of dialogue and the mood system in young children's language (1984). Vihla analyzes the use and meaning of modality in medical discourse (1999). In China, Yang Xinzhang (2006) studies the distribution of core modal verb and modal adjunct in both legal and academic texts. However, little research aims to synthesize native use of modality to afford some clue to English classroom modality teaching by describing and explaining the microcosmic differences in the use of English modality in Chinese and American News personal commentaries. For this very purpose, news personal commentary appearing in the media is adopted to explore the use of modality within the discourse. To guarantee the standardization of the corpus, corpus in the present study all comes from China Daily and The New York Times, the most representative publication in either country. To ensure the high proficiency of the subjects, discourse is confined to news personal commentary appearing in the media and topics of those commentaries are strictly controlled as exchange rate of RMB, Shanghai Expo and global climate change to exclude confounds brought about by varied themes. With a tentatively quantative analysis of the two complied datasets of written English texts, differences in modality using are as follows:when expressing personal opinions, Chinese users are more inclined to use nuclear modal verbs, while Americans are more willing to resort to modal adjuncts; compared with Chinese English users, types of modal verbs and modal adjuncts used by American users are more abundant; Chinese users adopted more modal expressions of median value. Those differences are especially exhibited in the use of modal adjunct of extent and comment. American users tend to use plentiful and abundant modal adjunct s of extent and comment in their writing.On the basis of a thorough description of the differences and in line with the theoretical framework of related research on modal type, orientation and value in Functional Grammar and the theory of culture influencing language use, the thesis makes an attempt to explore the deep culture element. This study can help refine the understanding of the micro-linguistic features in cross-cultural discourses. Differences uncovered in this study can help to give some clues to English beginners in learning native modal expressions, and to some extent can give some implications to the traditionally isolated modality teaching in English class.