A Study Of Modality In Text World Theory

The thesis studies the introductions of Chinese ancient towns through Text WorldTheory, discussing the modality in the book. Modality is the term given to those aspects oflanguage which expresses a speaker or writer’s attitude to a particular subject. At the sametime, the thesis analyses the combination of the words and pictures in the information,discussing the universality and particularity of the text. At last, the conclusion gives someuseful information for both the writer of the travel handbook and the readers.Text World Theory (Werth,1999; Gavins,2007) is a very important theory to studycognitive discourse. More and more cognitive linguists realize that when one person isreading a text, a mental representation will be informed in his brain. Text is acommunicative discourse, and the communications produces dialogue relationshipsthrough summon structure combined by texts of author and the reaction of the reader. Thedevelopment of discourse produces countless text worlds, Text World Theory is used toanalyse the whole text.Although Text World Theory is an instructive and introductory theory to studycognitive discourse, nowadays the study on Text World Theory is a new area. In recentyears, much work has been done in this field(The Study of Aesthetic in Text WorldTheory-A case of Qiu Yuan Jishi, Yang,2011; Explore the Beatles’ Song lyrics Through AText-World-model-Based Analysis of Negation, Huang,2007), but nobody has studied onmodality.With the Text World Theory as the basic theory, the thesis firstly pays attention tothe feature and expression ways of modality in the collected information; then discussesthe relationship between the feature and the expression ways; finally, based on the textitself, the thesis gives both writers and readers useful suggestion.The thesis takes Text World Theory as the basic theory. In this thesis, the researchmethod mainly used is qualitative analysis. In qualitative analysis, the case taken in thisthesis is197Chinese ancient towns in Tourism Self-Service in Chinese Ancient Towns.The procedures of the thesis has three steps, they are:(1) Collect information of197 Chinese ancient towns in Tourism Self-Service in Chinese Ancient Towns.(2) Based onthe combination of the words and pictures in the handbook, pay attention to the expressionand feature of modality, for example, length, size, font and so on.(3) Based on theinformation of modality collected, give useful suggestion for travel handbook writers andreaders respectively.The main conclusions are followings:(1) Modality has universality in texts.(2)Based on the information of Chinese ancient towns in the handbook, the expression ofmodality in the data is word, phrases and combination of words and pictures, and if thefeature of modality is strong in the data, the readers would be attracted to go to thedestination, if the modality is weak in the data, the readers would not spend time on going.(3) Complicate that the expression and feature of modality make the handbook readable.The implication of the paper is that the suggestions for both the editor and readers can beused in tourism handbooks writing in the future.