hing,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 Distributi
