Modality And Discourse:a Corpus-Based Functional Approach

Modality as a concept is related to the manner languages signify speaker’s evaluation of the state of affairs in a given discourse, or, the speaker’s involvement in discourse. The study of modality has been approached by linguistic schools like traditional grammar, semantics, pragmatics, structural grammar, functional grammar and cognitive grammar. Each of the schools has faced its own problems and produced an account with limitation as to what the word modality entails and which expressions should be included under the headline of modality.So far corpus-based modality studies have proved to be reliable. Assisted by a corpus we can better reveal the relationship between modality and discourse, and also between discourse and discourse. Discourses within the scope of this study are legal discourse, English package inserts and science discourse. The variables adopted for analysis are modal verbs and metaphorical modal expressions. Though the study is an empirical one, it cannot be done without the theoretical framework proposed by Halliday. The relationship between discourse and modal indeterminacy will be tackled on three dimensions of modality:the epistemic-deontic dimension, the value dimension and the subjective-objective dimension.The study also provides a feasible framework to investigate modality in discourse.