Modality In Both English And Chinese And Its Reflections In Texts

This thesis is a contrastive study on modality in both English and Chinese and its reflections in different texts. The paper starts with the introduction of research done by contemporary linguists in English speaking countries and their relevant achievements. As a basic part of the grammar, modality is a crucial element in the construction of texts, and plays an important role in the mood of the text. The significant roles of modality in texts make it necessary for us to teach and to learn effectively.Many English learners think that modality in both English and Chinese is represented by a group of modal verbs and is fairly easy to learn. But whenever they meet with modality, they cannot work out its accurate meaning, but rely on the equivalent modal words in their mother tongue. In fact, the seemingly similar modal words are quite different from language to language. So modality deserves a contrastive study between Chinese and English. Through a comprehensive analysis of modality used in both English and Chinese, including different terms in the two language systems, the different degree carried by a certain modality, the different way of negation, and interrogation, the paper verifies that modality is not as simple as what the English learners thinkStudying modality, in terms of its functions and frequency of occurrence in a certain kind of texts is an innovative method in contrastive study. Through the analysis, we can see clearly how modality works in the real texts and in what aspects they are different from each other. So, the writer of the paper hopes that the current research can arouse English learners' interest in the learning of modality and can benefit from it in the future application of English in translation, writing, or reading.