Cognitive Modality In Academic Spoken Discourse

From the traditional grammar perspective, modal expressions may be used to communicate at least two broad clusters of meanings: epistemic modal meanings and deontic modal meanings. However, the concept of epistemic modality in the academic community still does not have a clear and unanimous concept. Just as Halliday said, modality is a continuum, from one extreme polarity (certainty) to another extreme polarity (possibly), during which it is difficult to distinguish completely the boundaries of each specific definition. In order to specify the vague definition (epistemic modality), this thesis illustrate the notion from epistemic modal meaning and epistemic modal expression these two aspects. This thesis takes the academic spoken language as the target text of current research. Comparing with the Academic written Language, the Academic Spoken Language (ASL in this thesis) is always neglected by linguists. The difficulties of collecting transcriptions of the ASL are the stumbling blocks of research in this field. This thesis tries to redefine the ASL. And base on the transcriptions of ASL in MICASE (Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English) and also some other academic spoken materials, this thesis gives out the conclusion that the epistemic modals play important roles in ASL. The thesis gives a detailed analysis of epistemic modals in academic discourse, from interpersonal meanings and systemic functional linguistics aspects.