A Corpus-based Analysis Of Modality Orientations In Hong Kong Policy Address Speeches

The paper aims to make an analysis of Hong Kong Policy Address Speeches from1997-2013in terms of modality orientation. Halliday (2004) subdivides modality into orientations of subjective, objective, explicit and implicit. According to the different degrees of the speaker’s public responsibility for his expressions, the possibility of modality orientations can be reflected in different ways, for the speaker can explicitly express his own point of view through modality or objectivise the view to make it a true event. In order to find out how these happen in the policy address, and how they are used by the speaker, on behalf of the government, to spread and infuse his ideology to his people thus to achieve the communicative purpose, the paper intends to examine different modal expressions and their distributions in the analysis of related modality orientation.The data is collected by online corpus that consists of the already existing speeches from1997-2009(13speeches) and speeches from2010to2013downloaded from the Hong Kong Government’s website and then uploaded to the corpus. Concordancer shipped with the corpus already is used to explore distribution of different modal expressions. Both quantitative and qualitative methods are applied to analyze the modality orientation.Research findings suggest as follows. The speeches see more implicit than explicit orientation and more subjective than objective orientation. Implicitly subjective orientation has highest frequency of the occurrence, taking more than half of the all. It is followed by implicitly objective orientation and explicitly objective orientation, while the least frequently occurred is explicitly subjective orientation since too many subjective expressions in an apparent way may affect the authority of the policy speeches and lead to more modal responsibility. Therefore, implicitly subjective orientation that makes the view appear as a quality of the event itself is more preferred in the policy address speeches. By this orientation, the speaker, namely the Chief Executive on behalf of Hong Kong government can express his own views or beliefs clearly to spread and infuse the ideology to his people more easily but reduce or avoid apparent subjectivity and certain modal responsibility for his speeches at the same time which will finally achieve the communicative purpose. The study analyzes the special political texts of China, Hong Kong Policy Address Speeches in English, from an angle of modality orientation that has been paid less attention. It mainly reveals the important influence of modality orientation on the expression of views and beliefs as well as related modal responsibility in given contexts. The research is hoped to offer some references in the study of interpersonal meaning of political texts and it may help to give a profounder understanding of political texts.