Comparative Analysis Of The Interpersonal Meanings Of The Modality In The English And Chinese Book Reviews

A book review is a critical evaluation of a text, with the purpose of introducing and commenting on a particular work or a series of works. As the saying goes if there are a hundred audience, then there will be a hundred Hamlets. It is not easy to satisfy the critic himself, the audience, the author of the books and the editor at the same time. So interpersonal metafunction is significant for the book reviews. Modality is an important realization to express the interpersonal meanings. Interpersonal metafunction of book reviews is studied through the modality system in the thesis.Although linguists in the world have done large numbers of studies from the different perspectives, few of them take great interest in the comparative study of different kinds of expressions of the modality system in English and Chinese and the interpersonal meanings realized by them within the framework of functional grammar. Therefore, the research will be carried out to compare the distributions of the modal expressions in English and Chinese book reviews, to explore the interpersonal meanings conveyed by them, and then try to predict the possible reasons.It is a corpus-based study in the framework of Halliday's systemic functional grammar with reference to the Perkins'works. The analysis will be divided into five parts according to the realization of the modality system. Then the analysis of the interpersonal meanings is drawn from it. It shows that there are both similarities and differences between the interpersonal meanings of modals in English and Chinese. Politeness principle and objectivity are the common concern for them. However, comparatively, English think much of the objectivity and Chinese take the authority in an important place. The context of situation and context of culture may be used to explain them.The study enlarges the category of contrastive analysis of modality system to the genre of book reviews. It provides some implications to the further study of contrastive analysis of the interpersonal meanings of modality. It also brings some implications to English teaching and learning.