A Quest For Subjective And Objective Perspectives To English Modality

Modality is a more complex grammatical category. It expresses the speaker's attitude and opinion and also expresses the speaker's permission and expectation to the event which the listener does, which represents the subjectivity of the utterance; meanwhile it is also the neutral observer's objective report of the existence of the state of affairs. Because many utterances in the daily life refer to modality, the modality researches get comprehensive concern. Therefore the thesis makes the English modality as the target of research to explore the distinctions and relations between the subjectivity and objectivity of modality. The thesis uses the basic concepts and theories of modal logics and pragmatics to introduce the research history and the research methods of modality, to discuss modality and modality system and to carefully analyze the subjectivity and objectivity modality.The thesis is divided into four parts. First part is the introduction of the research history of modality, which is mainly from the aspects of foreign and domestic status quo and the methods of the modality research. The modality research can be traced back to Ancient Greek Philosopher Aristotle who originally wrote the idea of modality. The thesis introduces the good results of modality research in several linguistic genres, such as traditional grammar, modal logic, transformational generative grammar, systemic functional grammar and cognitive grammar, etc.Second, the thesis gives the definitions to the relative concepts which occur in the thesis, including the definitions of modality, the types of modality, the expressions of modality and others related concepts. Overall, the nature of modality is to stress the subjective and objective problem, i.e. modality is grammatical category which expresses the speaker's subjective attitudes and opinions towards the proposition that the sentence expresses or the objective factuality of the situation that the proposition describes. And depending on Palmer's modality theory, modality can be divided into the propositional modality and the event modality. The former includes the epistemic modality and the evidential modality, which concerns with the speaker's judgment of the proposition, whereas the latter includes the deontic modality and dynamic modality, which concerns with the speaker's attitude towards a potential future event. In the aspect of modality expression, the thesis not only analyzes the widely acceptable way of modal expression------modal auxiliaries, but also discusses the expressions of non-modal auxiliaries and other linguistic devices. The thesis shows that modal auxiliaries occupy a more central position in the grammatical structure of English than the other modal expressions. At the same time, the thesis briefly states anther important component in the modality system------mood and its relation between modality: mood is the grammatical expression of the modality.Third, the thesis does a careful analysis of the subjective modality and objective modality. Lyons (1982) originally proposed the concepts of subjective modality and objective modality. He considered that subjective modality is speaker's opinion, attitude, willingness and authority rather than reporting the existence of the state of affairs as the neutral observers, whereas the objective modality is the speaker's objective expression for the factuality of the propositional content of the utterance. For the question whether the English modality is subjective or objective, different linguists have different opinions. First the thesis analyzes the subjectivity and objectivity of English deontic modality to prove the English modality has the subjectivity-objectivity. It starts its analysis from the speaker's judgment and speaker's willingness. Then, it further analyzes the subjectivity and objectivity of epistemic modality, because these two modalities are the basic types of modality in traditional grammar.Last, the subjectivity and objectivity of modality can be reflected by conditionals, interrogative, tense, etc. in syntax. From all the analysis the thesis makes the readers know how subjective modality and objective modality expressed in the utterances, which will help them to study and explore the English modality in different levels and with multi-angles, and which will also helps them to learn and use the modality well.