A Contrastive Study On Modality In American And Chinese TV Interviews

With the prosperous development of discourse analysis and conversation analysis, the scope of discourse analysis has expanded to cover many types of institutional interaction, such as discourse between doctors and patients and discourse in classrooms. TV interview, as a typical category of institutional interaction, is becoming more and more popular these days among all those TV programs. This thesis is going to collect twenty TV interviews from famous programs of TV interview, ten from America and ten from China as the data and focus on the modality system in TV interviews. In this way, it aims firstly to find out how the modal expressions are distributed in the two groups of TV interviews, secondly to explore the possible relationship between the distribution of modal expressions and the realization of interpersonal meaning in the two groups of TV interviews, and thirdly to compare the modality systems in two groups of TV interviews.There are many studies focused on the modality system in different genres and there are many different theories studying the modality system. Since systemic functional grammar was proposed by Halliday in 1960s, it has been continuously contributing to various fields of study. Modality in this thesis is mainly conducted under the framework of systemic functional grammar from three perspectives, i.e. types of modality, modal orientation and modal value. Six categories of modal expressions, as the realizations of modality at the grammatical level, are investigated.The data collected from ten American TV interviews is 61820 words and that from Chinese TV interviews is 75821 words. All of these data is processed firstly through the software Wordsmith 5.0, and then checked manually.After careful analysis of the modality systems in American and Chinese TV interviews, i.e. Am and Ch, it is found that the modality systems in the two groups have both similarities and disparities. Modal adjunct, finite modal operator and modal full verb are the most important realizations of modality in both groups. However, in terms of the three perspectives of modality, the distribution of modal expressions is quite different from each other in the two.