Study On Differences In The Use Of English Modal Adjuncts Between Chinese And Americans

Modal adjuncts are one type of modal expressions, and they are widely used in types of discourse. However, scholars often do not address modal adjuncts specially, but give them one dimension in the classification of modal expression, let alone the cross-cultural contrastive analysis. Research on the cross-cultural differences in the use of modal expressions has recently received increasing attention, so this study focuses on a description and an explanation of the differences in the use of English modal adjuncts between authors from Chinese versus American cultural backgrounds, and argues that the differences reflect an underlying cultural difference.Based on the co-relational studies on language’s interpersonal function initiated by the founder of systemic-functional grammar——Halliday, from the perspective of modal adjuncts in modality system, this study illustrates the general use of modal adjuncts in personal commentary, the differences in the use of modal adjuncts between authors from Chinese and American cultural background, and underlying culture factor. Two controlled datasets consisting of written English texts of personal commentary appearing in the media respectively produced by these authors are compiled——The Chinese dataset is from China Daily, Xinhuanet (English edition) and Beijing Review, and the American dataset is from Los Angeles Times, New York Times and Chicago Daily Tribune. With a rigorous scheme of analysis, the cross-dataset differences in the use of modal adjuncts are identified. This study uses the software AntConc3.2.1w to calculate the distribution frequency of modal adjuncts employed in these two comparable datasets and adopts both qualitative and quantitative methods.Broadly speaking, differences as well as similarities are in existence with regard to the use of modal adjuncts in personal commentary between authors from Chinese and American cultural background. In both datasets, the use of modal adjuncts reflects corresponding interpersonal meaning, and mood adjuncts have much higher frequency than comment adjuncts. The primary difference lies in that modal adjuncts in the American dataset have much higher frequency than those in the Chinese dataset, especially in the use of some subsets of modal adjuncts.Through revealing the differences in relation to cultural background, this study can help increase our understanding of the cultural implications of the differences in the micro-linguistic features in discourse, can help broaden the vision of variation studies in sociolinguistics, and can help non-native learners to check out what they need to improve and to arrive at a better understanding of the ways to express themselves more accurately, politely and tactfully, at least in the use of modal adjuncts.