A Corpus-based Study Of The Representation Of Interpersonal Meaning Of Modality In The Chinese Versions Of Shakespeare's Plays

There is a trend in modern linguistic and literature research that much attention has been paid to the interpersonal, variable and negotiable meanings of discourse, which means that people begin to realize the importance of interpersonal function.In spite of the interactive nature of translation, the interpersonal meaning has been ignored in traditional translation studies. Even in modern translation research, there is no special and systematic study of interpersonal meaning of text. Some scholars have written essays on the subject of interpersonal meaning, but none of them conducted any research on the representation of interpersonal meaning of the Chinese versions of Shakespeare's plays.Based on Halliday's systematic functional linguistics, the author used parallel corpus of Shakespeare's plays, which is independently constructed by the School of Foreign Languages of SJTU, to make a quantitative and qualitative research on modality in terms of modal operators, modal adjuncts and interpersonal metaphor. The thesis aims to explore the different ways of representation of interpersonal meaning in the Chinese versions and to discuss the different methods of representation in the two Chinese versions.After a detailed quantitative and qualitative analysis, it is concluded that the modal operator, modal adjuncts and the interpersonal metaphors chosen appear 2683 times and their total frequency of every thousand words is 15.70. Most of the modal expressions could be successfully represented in the two Chinese versions, however, some translations are inappropriate in terms of the value and orientation of modality, which is mainly caused by different translation methods of the two translators.