英语新闻语篇中情态的人际意义研究

发布时间：2016-08-23 07:12

Chapter One Introduction

1.1 Research Background
The notion modality has long been a hot topic studied by many philosophers,logicians and linguists since it’s introduced into classical philosophy at the time ofAristotle, more than 2000 years ago. However, its initial research by traditionalgrammar is merely restricted in the study of modal auxiliaries, which believes thatmodality is a series of model verbs used to express meanings, leaving the factors oflanguage context and human neglected. While the emergence of systemic-functionalgrammar breaks through the limitation of traditional grammar which employsfunction as a principle to classify and describe modality systemically within itsframework. The theory was proposed by Halliday(1960) who generalized themetafunctions of language as ideational, interpersonal and textual. Among whichinterpersonal function refers to we use language to interact with others, to establishand maintain relations with them, to please them, to anger them, and influence theirbehavior, to get their help or sympathy (language serves as a medium betweenindividuals) (Yang Zhong, 2011).While the interpersonal meanings of language areexactly realized by mood and modality. Mood concerns the interaction betweenaudiences and speakers, while modality involves all the aspects of discourseexpressed or evaluated by speakers and audiences. Performing as one of the mostimportant means in realizing interpersonal function, modality is a kind of subjectivejudgment which conveys the speaker’s perspective and the validity of his or herassertion, as well as the attitude and emotion of suggestion (right or wrong) in thediscourse.
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1.2 Objective and Significance of the Research
In the light of Halliday’s systemic-functional grammar, the objective of thisthesis is to analyze the features of modality system and their distribution in Englishnews discourse. Furthermore, the thesis also aims to figure out how the interpersonalmeanings of modality are realized. In the modern world, news is the main channel thatprovides information for people to know about what’s happening around them or evenin the whole world. As a matter of fact, it also helps shape people’s cognition andideology. However, to some extent, news is not such objective as people haveimagined. It is an indirect expression of attitudes or opinions representing the reporters and their authority behind them. In this way, different meanings of modalitywould be employed. On the other hand, in terms of its significance in English learningand teaching, news English is capable of reflecting new features and changes ofEnglish language and English newspaper is usually the reading material. Based onthese assumptions, such a kind of study may be considered to be feasible and of greatimportance.Theoretically, by analyzing modality in news discourse, its interpersonalmeanings in this genre could be reflected. Further, the application ofsystemic-functional grammar in discourse analysis and language communication mayalso be perfected so as to provide references for relevant researches.Practically, on the one hand, it is expected that modality features, distributionand its interpersonal meanings in English new discourse could be elaborated, whichmay attract people’s more attention to the use of modality in news report, especiallyfor the journalists. To some degree, it is also anticipated that the study results couldprovide some practical guidance for using modality correctly in their news reportswriting as well as help them to improve their language awareness. What is conveyedthrough news reports would more or less exert influence on readers’ viewpoints. Onthe other hand, a better understanding of modality use may help readers to grasp thereporters’ orientation (subjective or objective) so that implicit meaning of the newscan be perceived. Most importantly, it attempts to give guidance on how to expressopinions accurately and properly by using modality. For English learning and teaching,it also provides some implications for Chinese educators and learners to betterunderstand the use of modality.
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Chapter Two Literature Review

2.1 Overview of the Research on Modality
It is universally believed that the study of modality can be traced back to the ageof Aristotle. Originally, Aristotle discussed the interrelationships between necessityand possibility (Perkins, 1983). In the long history of the study of modality, a largenumber of scholars had committed their work on it. Modality is an extremelycomplicated notion in various sciences. In linguistics, it can be generally seen fromtwo perspectives as traditionally and systemic-functionally.From the angle of semantics, Lyons (1977) was the first to define modality as aspeaker’s opinion or attitude on a statement or the situation described by a statement.Meanwhile, he emphasized the important role of subjectivity in language study andproposed the concepts of subjective modality and objective modality. On the basis ofLyons’ definition, Palmer (1986) made a more comprehensive elaboration to modalitywho argued that modality is the grammaticalization of a speaker’s subjectiveviewpoint or attitude. By placing modality on an axis, he believed that horizontallymodality can be classified into four types: epistemic, evidential, deontic and dynamicmodality. And vertically, modality possessed different values according to possibilityand necessity (Tang Jing’an, Yang Quan, 2008). Besides, Coates, Levinson, Quirk,Sweetste and many other scholars interpreted modality and its meaning from theangles of corpus, pragmatics, traditional grammar and cognitive linguistics, etc.Consequently, many linguists have not reached an agreement. However, generallyspeaking, it can be understood as a speaker’s attitude of a certain statement on thebasis of a speaker’s cognition, affection or wishes (Asher, 1995).
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2.2 Overview of the Research on News Discourse
Language communication does not occur through isolated sentences. Indeed, it isrealized through discourse. Discourse linguistics emerged in the early 1960s which is an independent discipline. In 1952, American structuralism linguist Zelling Harrispublished an article titled Discourse Analysis which opened a prelude to the study ofdiscourse. The European discourse analysis began in Germany in 1960s. In 1967,German linguist Weinrich first proposed the term of discourse linguistics and hebelieved that the study of any language is under the framework of discourse (TaiQingyan, 2014).Discourse, a unit that is larger than a sentence in communication, is taken as aresearch object by discourse linguistics to study its meaning, structure and form oforganization from a multiple perspective in a more comprehensive way. With thedeepening of the research level, many researches of discourse are conducted fromgrammar, semantic meanings and pragmatic meanings of discourse to the cognition ofdiscourse, the language phenomenon within the discourse to some external factors andcohesion of form to semantic coherence, which makes the study of discoursegradually step forwards improvement.
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Chapter Three Theoretical Framework.... 15
3.1 Halliday’s Metafunctions of Language...... 15
3.1.1 Three Metafunctions of Language........... 15
3.1.2 Interpersonal Meaning of Language........ 16
3.2 Modality System in Systemic-Functional Linguistics...... 17
3.2.1 Modality and Polarity........17
3.2.2 Types of Modality......19
3.2.3 Orientation of Modality.....20
3.2.4 Values of Modality.....22
3.3 Linguistic Realization of Modality.....23
3.4 Summary.......31
Chapter Four Interpersonal Meanings of Modality in English News Discourse..........33
4.1 Research Design...........33
4.2 Distribution of Modal Expressions in English News Discourse......35
4.3 Interpersonal Meaning from the Perspective of Modality Type.......36
4.3.1 Modalization...... 38
4.3.2 Modulation.........4
4.4 Interpersonal Meaning from the Perspective of Modality Value......45
4.5 Interpersonal Meaning from the Perspective of Modality Orientation....51
4.6 Summary.......56
Chapter Five Conclusion...........60
5.1 Major Findings..... 60
5.2 Implications of the Research.......61
5.3 Limitations of the Research.........62
5.4 Suggestions for Further Research.......63

Chapter Four Interpersonal Meanings of Modality inEnglish News Discourse

In this chapter, research design will be introduced. And most importantly, thischapter will give a comprehensive and explicit explanation on the data of news corpusfrom The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Guardian so as to find outthe research results. As an important and commonly used language phenomenon innews discourse, modality can be achieved by many modal expressions, as isillustrated in the part of theoretical framework. Firstly, the occurrence and generaldistribution of modal expressions will be presented in the first section. Then, thefrequency of modality from each perspective will be explained respectively and thefeatures of distribution will also be revealed. Finally, the interpersonal functionreflected by the modality and possible factors which affect the use of modality will beexplored. All in all, the research questions are expected to be answered in this part.

4.1 Research Design

A scientific research methoddology is significant which provides guidance forthe successful conducting of a study.According to the previous review and discussion, the present research will beconducted on the basis of Halliday’s systemic-functional grammar and Perkin’sillustration about modal expressions. In this study, both qualitative and quantitativeresearch methods are adopted. Firstly, to ensure the validity of the research results, 30English news discourses are randomly selected within a month to establish a corpusfor the sake of better illustrating the problems and build a corpus as a sample, whichis necessary and appropriate. The news discourses are selected from New York Times,The Washington Post and The Guardian, which are popular and credible in the world.

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Conclusion

Recently, much attention has been paid to research on the news discourse for itsdistinctive features of language. Modality, an indispensable tool of language, plays avery important role in news discourse. According to Halliday, language has threemetafunctions: ideational, interpersonal and textual. Therefore, this thesis takes 30news samples as linguistic data to explore the interpersonal meanings of modality inEnglish news discourse based on systemic-functional grammar. The news sampleswere selected from the official websites of The New York Times and The WashingtonPost from America and The Guardian from Britain.In chapter three, a systemic and in-depth study on modality is investigated,which provides a complete theoretical framework for the study. In chapter four, theresearch is conducted centering around the three research questions. Firstly, thedistribution of modal expressions is displayed in the section of 4.1. It shows that thedistribution of modal expression is characterized by high frequency of finite modaloperator. In the second place, modal adjunct ranks as the second and modal lexicalverb as the third. The proportion of other expressions is small. Secondly, the researchis launched form three perspectives of modality type, value and orientation, thereby toinvestigate the interpersonal function of modality system.
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The reference (omitted)

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