| Modality, defined by Lyons (1977) as 'the speaker's opinion or attitude towards the proposition that the sentence expresses or the situation that the proposition describes', has special functions in human languages: (i) it directly reflects 'the speaker's subjectivity or objectivity towards an utterance' (Palmer, 1986) and, (ii) many utterances in daily life consist of modality. As a matter of fact, it has been one of the most pervasive and persistent issues in logic, philosophy and linguistics. Ever since the ancient times (which can be dated back to Aristotle's time), people have been interested in this subject, hi the linguistic field solely, several approaches as traditional grammar, semantics and pragmatics have been done some valuable researches, though with their own limitations.In traditional grammar and transformational generative grammar, with Quirk (1985) and Radford (1988/2000) taking the lead, modality is considered to be the meanings expressed by a series of modal auxiliaries as can, could, may, might, will, would, shall, should, ought, have to etc.Semantics esp. formal semantics and general semantics have also shown their interests in modality. The former puts the emphasis on the study of modal logic (esp. necessity & possibility), in which modal auxiliaries are regarded as the function words: these function words can be used to form complex clauses with the combination of other non-modal clauses. The latter, represented by Lyons (1977), stresses on the epistemic modality and deontic modality only.Pragmatics also does some researches in this field, especially when discussing the conversational implicature and the pragmatic presupposition, although the stress is always on the utterances in contexts.It can be seen from the above descriptions, that 'traditionalapproaches on modality, more often than not, pays much attentions to its form, logic, concept and other related issues, neglecting the living language in which these concepts exist (adopted from Lijie, Zhong Shouping, 2002).A long time ago, with the development of modern linguistics, esp. with the foundation and maturity of systemic-functional linguistics, such linguists as Halliday (1994/2000), Eggins (1994), Bloor (1995/2001) and Thompson (1996/2000) have provided some fresh ideas to the study of modality, and most important of all, supported us an applicable model for such analyses. Therefore, we may say that the real study of modality has just begun. As a result, this thesis attempts to make a detailed study of modality within the framework of systemic-functional linguistics, and puts forward some viewpoints with regard to the unsolved issues, thereby paving the way for its further studies.This thesis consists of four parts, with an introduction and a conclusion before and after the main body respectively.The introduction explains the title of the thesis: why I choose modality as the specific topic of study? why I choose systemic-functional linguistics as the method of analysis? and why I choose English as the object of analysis?Part I provides some preliminaries for the thesis. It consists of one chapter only. This chapter deals with two basic issues: (i) A review of some earlier studies; and (ii) A tentative outline of the thesis. It begins with a brief introduction to the studies of modality as traditional grammar, transformational-generative grammar, semantics and pragmatics. Based on these descriptions, a general outline of the thesis has been made: (i) Amicroscopic study, i.e. modality is dealt with at the level of clauses; (ii) A macroscopic study, i.e. modality is analyzed in texts (discourses); The two belongs to the theoretical' part of the thesis, (iii) A contrastive study, i.e. modality is studied in the two contrasting texts. This belongs to the application part of the thesis.Part II takes a microscopic study to modality. It falls into two chapters (chapter 2 and chapter 3), Chapter 2 concerns with the semantic aspect of modality, while chapter 3 concerns with the lexico-g...
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