A Contrastive Study Of Modality In English And Chinese 'Instructions For Contributors' Texts

The contrastive studies between English and Chinese remain one of the most pervasive and intriguing areas of linguistic inquiry. And significant achievements in this field have been yielded. However, most of the studies have been predominantly concerned with the analysis of problems pertaining to language structure rather than language use. Moving to modality, though there is a wealth of literature on the subject, it suffices to say that the study of modal verbs is often regarded as synonymous with the study of modality itself. And other carriers of modality rarely attract much attention in their own right. Besides, few researchers take great interest in the contrastive studies of English and Chinese modality. Thus, this thesis ventures to make a comparison and contrast of the realizations of modality in 'Instructions for contributors' texts between English and Chinese within the framework of functional grammar. The author aims to examine in detail the potential verbal and non-verbal means or the means of the combination of both to realize modality in English and Chinese, then takes a step further to find out the difference as well as similarity between the two languages with regards to the realization of modality, finally attempts to discover the underlying reasons leading to the disparity.The present work relies heavily on Hallidy's account of modality from a functional perspective with Perkins', Coates' and Hoye's works as supplementary. To be exact, the contrastive study will be carried out from the following six aspects: Finite Modal Operators, Modal Adjuncts, Modal-Adverbial Combinations, Modal Lexical Verbs, Nominal Modal Expressions, and Adjectival Modal Expressions. Besides, in order to avoid the main drawbacks of much previous work on modality - the heavy reliance on invented example, the present inquiry is very much the product of a corpus approach to the subject of modality. It is a studyof naturally occurring written texts, 'Instructions for Contributors' in English and Chinese. To be specific, 15 English and Chinese'Instructions for Contributors' have been collected and analyzed.Broadly speaking, disparities as well as similarities are in existence with regard to the realization of modality in English and Chinese 'Instructions for Contributors' texts with disparities dominating. To begin with, Chinese differs from English in that editors show different preference towards Finite Modal Operators with varied value attached. The occurrence of Finite Modal Operators with median value attached is of the highest frequency in English, while it reaches the lowest point in Chinese. On the contrary, Finite Modal Operators with high value attached culminate in Chinese, while they decline to the lowest point in English. This reveals that Chinese editors are conceived as authoritative in terms of tenor, while in English it is less so. Besides, no Adjectival Modal Expressions are found in Chinese 'Instructions for Contributors' texts. In addition, Chinese is different from English in terms of the varied category central to the expression of modality. In English, Finite Modal Operators are indeed more central to the expression of modality than the non-auxiliary modal expressions, which tend to be realized lexically, and are thus grammatically more peripheral. In Chinese, Modal Adjuncts instead are the most prominent means to express modality. This might be ascribed to the fact that Chinese is rich of Modal Adjuncts whose sense is of more nuance than that of English. Thus, the meaning expressed by Modal Adjunct is somewhat more precise than that expressed by auxiliary verbs.