A Study Of Possible Modality On Contemporary Chinese

When language is being used by human beings, it contains a process of showing one's own thought and emotions. In order to understand it properly, we need to catch the modal expressions through the language. The content considered in this paper is the modality under a "pan-mood" point of view. Based on this point of view, this paper mainly considers the "possible modality" and its modal responsibility in the contemporary Chinese.One key point in this paper is "possible modality", which includes modal verbs, adverbs of mood, and other means, such as "yuqici", mood and modal adjuncts, etc. Another key point here is the "modal responsibility", which considers the reason why people are going to hide their responsibility when they are communicating with others. Through the analysis of modal responsibility, a better way will be found to text understanding.The whole paper is divided into six parts. The first part recapitulates the basic explanations of mood and modality and their similarity between the Chinese linguists and the western linguists under the "pan-mood" point of view.The second part is the main part of this paper. According to Halliday's theory on Functional Grammar and the reality of the contemporary Chinese, the author defines the specialty and the category of "possible modality" in use. The "possible modality" in Chinese language can be divided into "propositional modality" and "additional modality", which are corresponded to the "explicit" and "implicit" expression in Halliday's theory. There are also "subject orientation" and "object orientation" under the "propositional modality" and "additional modality" respectively.The third and the fourth parts are expanding the previous content, in these two parts, the author divides the subject and object orientation in both "prepositional modality" and "additional modality" in detail with argumentation.The fifth part is a supplement to the whole paper, in which the author considers the values of modality expressing the possible modality, and the modal responsibility has difference too.The last part is the conclusion and shortcomings to the whole paper, the author also points out the way to do further research.