Study Of Modality By Stance Adverbials In Political Speeches

In recent years, stance adverbials, modality and political speeches are all hot topics in linguistics. Most researches either study the modality or interpersonal meanings in political discourses or analyze modality realizations from the modal operator's aspect. However, this thesis attempts to study the modality realizations on the combination of stance adverbials and modality in political speeches. This is the purpose of this thesis and the significance of the study.This thesis, in the theoretical framework of Halliday's modality and Biber's stance adverbials, taking the self-constructed corpus, The Political Speeches Corpus PSC) as target object, studies the modality realizations in political speeches. The main procedures are:firstly extracting the stance adverbials in the forms of single adverbs and prepositional phrases; and then classifying them according to different modality meanings they can present; thirdly, through comparison with the referential corpus, BROWN, finding out the features of modality by stance adverbials and their effects on political speeches.Parts of the research results are:as for the distribution, all the three kinds of stance adverbials are found in the target corpus; the epistemic stance adverbials have the highest frequencies both in PSC and BROWN; the style and attitude stance adverbials occur more frequently in PSC than in BROWN; in the aspect of effects on political speeches, the modality realized by epistemic stance adverbials makes the language more strict, objective and reliable, and is easily accepted by the audiences, which will bring the effect of gaining support from the listeners; the positive attitude expressions are used to make the language more friendly and arouse the audience's positive feelings; the style meanings are made use of by the speakers to overtly impose restrictions on their own propositions, which will add reliability and validity to the speakers'propositions.