A Study Of Modality System In The Media Statements On Flight MH370

Modality is understood as one of the major ways to express speaker's attitude to the message, existing widely in discourses. Modality can represent speaker's“evaluations” or “attitudes”. In discourses, modality is always used to express the speaker's hidden intention. Halliday puts forward the theory of modality system, which covers type, value, orientation and expression. According to Halliday's Systemic-Functional Grammar, the interpersonal meaning is mainly expressed through mood and modality.Malaysia Airlines set up a special column to follow up the reports for MH370, as soon as the air disaster happened on 08 th March,2014. The official homepage of Malaysia Airlines announces the most authoritative and the latest information about MH370. Under the framework of Halliday's Functional Grammar, this study analyzes the modality of these statements from the perspectives of the type of modality, the value of modality, the orientation of modality and the modal expressions. The study aims at revealing how the speakers of the Malaysia media statements confuse the information by adopting modality, and then manipulate the target audience's ideologies and maintain their own political and economic interests.This study adopts both qualitative and quantitative analysis methods. Besides, the SPSS is also applied to the statistic analysis. The data are selected from media statements on flight MH370 from 08 th March, 2014 to 06 th August, 2015, which are totally 46 sample statements(30,562 words). The major findings are shown as follows.(1) In this paper, the type, value, orientation and modal expressions of the modality have been analyzed in detail. All the above analysis can help us to reveal the unfair power relations which are covered in the discourses and to judge the truth of the statements. The speakers of the media statements are inclined to make use of themodality to express the uncertainty about possible event.(2) As to the types of modality, probability, usuality, obligation and inclination are introduced separately in detail. It is obvious that the modal expressions of usuality appear more frequently than the three other types. Usuality is an effective and secretive way for the speakers to transfer responsibility. Next is the value of modality. The selected media statements tend to make use of modal expressions with low and median value, while high value is relatively rarely adopted. With the help of low and median value, the speaker's opinions seem to be more objective. Besides, a large amount of the median value expressions make the statements more acceptable. When it comes to the orientation of modality, subjective or objective orientation, the implicit statements appear more frequently than the explicit ones. We can find that the speakers are inclined to express their points of view in a more implicit way, which could make those opinions not seem too subjective and more credible for the audience.(3) Lastly, the Malaysia Government holds the vague and irresponsible attitudes towards this air disaster from the beginning to the end. Different types of modality are the effective ways for the speakers to transfer responsibility. Based on the discussion, we can see that the media statements pay less attention to the reasons for the unprecedented air disaster and try to avoid the actual developments of searching work. What is worse, the Malaysia authority released a large amount of inaccurate information. The Malaysia Airlines is trying every means to evade the important information and dwell up on the trivial through modality.