A Contrastive Study Of Interpersonal Meaning Of Deontic Modality In Chinese And English Advertisements

Interpersonal meaning is one of the three metafunctions proposed by Halliday (94-1124). He also argued that it can be realized by mood and modality system. These possible realizations of interpersonal meaning attracted many scholars to explore. However, few of them have done systemic analysis of how modality system realizes interpersonal meaning and deontic modality which is a subclass of modality has not been touched upon. This is the purpose of the thesis—to make up for some deficiencies in this field. This thesis is a comparative study of the deontic modality between English and Chinese advertisements and explores the causal factors for the differences between them. It also attempts to shed certain enlightenments on the further studies.The thesis selected 25 samples in both languages for the analysis. Through contrastive analysis, certain similarities and differences are found. We get that Chinese examples adopt more deontic modality than English does and incline to adopt higher value deontic modal expressions and those more subjective ones. Moreover, in order to get a comprehensive and deeper understanding of the differences of interpersonal meaning of deontic modality in both kinds of advertisements, the thesis further explores the causal factors in terms of cultural values for those differences and discovers that individualistic culture and in western countries and collectivistic culture in China have something to do with the differences. Moreover, the relatively high power distance in China and low power distance in western countries to some extend cause above mentioned differences in applying deontic modality.