Modality In Tmall Customer Review From The Perspective Of Modal System

From the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistics,discourse analysis based on the modal system is mostly applied to specific written texts,but less to spoken ones.Online customer reviews,as a new type of discourse with colloquial features and distinct emotional tendencies,are often studied in the field of computers.In order to maximize the reference value of product reviews,linguistic theories are needed to support them.In this study,the largest and most popular commodity shopping platform in China,“TMall”(www.tmall.com),is selected to collect customer reviews on the platform as real objects.This paper has randomly collected 1000 online reviews for each of the top two selling brands of the same product,including positive and negative reviews,to construct two corpora.Then this paper attempts to identify the modal expressions,categorize them into high,median and low three different values,and probability,usuality,obligation and inclination four modal types to decide the polarity of the entire review.Finally,the author specifically analyzes four different types of modal orientations,including explicit subjective orientation and implicit subjective orientation,explicit objective orientation and implicit objective orientation.The findings are as follows: First,the modal orientation of online customer reviews is determined by the modal expressions that consumers choose to use,implicit objective orientation is achieved by modal adjuncts(account for 78.37% of all sentimental lexicons),implicit subjective orientation is realized by modal auxiliary verbs(account for 9.55%),and explicit subjective orientation is realized by modal lexical verbs(account for 8.62%),and explicit objective orientation realized by relational clauses is seldom used in online customer reviews selected in this paper.Secondly,based on statistical analysis of this paper,the implicit subjective orientation and the implicit objective orientation account for the highest proportion in online customer review discourse,which indicates that most consumers tend to express their personal judgments on goods and services in a moderate and implied way,in order to take less responsibility to their judgments.This paper analyzes online customer reviews based on modal system and tries to verify the feasibility and effectiveness of applying modal system in online review discourse.At the same time,the author attempts to implement the scope of the application of modality,so as to promote the theoretical development and innovation of modal system;finally,it helps consumers to make more effective purchasing decisions by identifying modal expressions.Due to the limits of the author’s own research ability and the particularity of online reviews,there are still many deficiencies in this study.The objects of this paper are only involved in online food reviews,the representation of the objects still needs to be improved.