A Contrastive Study Of Modality In English And Chinese Film Reviews

With the film industry prosperity, film review arises as a special genre of writing. It aims to combine several purposes and deals with various relationships. A film review is a combination of making comment, providing guidance and evaluating about the film. It should better deal with the relationships between the writers, readers and film-making groups. The complex relationships are revealed through the words. Interpersonal metafunction is the key device to express such relations. Modality is an important device to realize interpersonal meanings. This thesis is an attempt to make a comparative study of modality system of English and Chinese film reviews.For quite a long period, large numbers of linguists and scholars have been taking great interests in this field. They have studied modality from semantic-pragmatic perspective. However, only a few of them have been pursuing the modality from contrastive aspect between English and Chinese within the framework of Systemic-Functional Grammar, especially making comparison of data collection based on the lexical-phrasal level of modality system. Therefore, this study is carried out to compare the modal expressions occurrence both in English and Chinese samples, analyze the realizations of languages conveyed, and then the reasons for causing this phenomenon are probed into.This study was data-based under the framework of Halliday's Systemic-Functional Grammar. Perkin's accounts of lexical modal verbs and adjectival modal expressions have also been adopted as the basis in English. In Chinese, Peng Xuanwei and Ma Qingzhu's explications were listed as reference. Based on lexical-phrasal perspective, five realizations of modality system were concentrated here. Generally speaking, there are disparities and similarities in existence in the realization of modality in English and Chinese film reviews. The differences are that in English modal operators are the central expressions to employ, while in Chinese people tend to use more modal adjuncts to express modality. Moreover, people in English use more gentle words in expressing modality than that of in Chinese.This thesis is only a try of application to functional study. It broadens the scope of contrastive analysis of modality system to the genre of film reviews. It is a foregoing attempt to the study of modality which may bring the implication for others to better understand film reviews.