The Contrastive Study Of Modality Orientations In English And Chinese News Reporting

Modality has long been a major focus of interest for logicians, philosophers and linguists. However, a large number of modality studies are restricted in the study of modal auxiliaries. Besides, the contrastive study of modality in English and Chinese attracts little attention not mentioning their contrastive study in news reporting. This dissertation aims at comparing the modality orientations implied in both English and Chinese news reporting. Mainly based on Halliday's framework of modality, this dissertation explores modality orientations in English and Chinese news reporting through the analysis of modal expressions in the two languages and their relations to modality orientations. Each modal orientation is attached to certain modal expressions. By counting the occurrence frequency of the expressions, the proportion of each orientation can be calculated; furthermore, orientations of English and Chinese news reporting can be detected and compared. In this dissertation, ten pieces of news reports (five in English totaling 3502 words and five in Chinese totaling 6092 words) serve as samples to be analyzed. We reach the conclusion that English news reports seem to be more implicit in subjective orientation and explicit in objective orientation. On the contrary, Chinese news reports appear to be more explicit in subjective orientation and implicit in objective orientation.