A Comparative Study On Expressions Of Epistemic Modality In English And Chinese

In recent years, scholars in linguistic field increasingly realize that languageis not only the basic tools with which human beings learn about the world, but alsoone of the forms for the transmission of human information and attitude. Modalityis one of the tools when language is used in communication, and also a kind ofreaction of human cognition, modality is the subjective attitude on the truth valueof the proposition of a sentence or reality of event state expressed by the speaker.Epistemic modality is assessment about in a possible world whether a propositionhas happened or not, that is the evaluator’s understanding of proposition’s truthvalue. Human beings processing the faculty of language determine the languageexpression themselves, therefore, every sentence we said contains the attitudetowards content of the sentence and towards the hearer. The research in modalexpressions will be of great significance in evaluating and assessing the attitudesof speakers and hearers.The research objects of this article are Chinese and English modalexpressions. In this thesis epistemic modality refers to those systematic, closedand highly grammaticalized modal expressions, rather than those system-scatteredones. This thesis is a qualitative research, which makes a comparative analysis ofEnglish and Chinese modal expressions. The corpus in this thesis is taken fromBrown+BNC (written) corpus and the modern Chinese corpus. Based on theclassic theories of the linguists and scholars, the epistemic modality are dividedinto four groups, including modal auxiliary, modal adjective, modal adverb, andfixed sentence pattern, together with an exclusive expressions in Chinese—modalparticles.In addition, this article will also study the similarities between Chinese and English epistemic modality from the aspects of cognition: first similarity issubjectivity which is based on evidentiality. That means subjective estimation ofepistemic modality is based on objective source of knowledge; second isperformativity which is based on speaker-oriented, a speech act is performed whenexpressing the speaker’s attitude toward the event at the moment of speaking; thirdis modal degrees which is based on their primitive meaning, Chinese and Englishepistemic modality both have different epistemic modal degrees; forth is thepossible world which is based on factual world. The relationship between possibleworld and epistemic modality is interwoven. Epistemic modality in both Englishand Chinese come from the possible world.Another significant part of this thesis is the research on the differences ofepistemic modality in English and Chinese. First the thesis will start with theexclusive feature in Chinese epistemic modality, the modal particle, emphasizingthe category peculiar to Chinese. Then a comparison will be made on the syntacticfunctions of English and Chinese epistemic modality. The syntactic structures ofEnglish epistemic modality tend to be fixed and stable, while those of Chineseepistemic modality are more flexible. Finally, three other points are made from theperspective of semantics: first, in terms of semantic field, the semantic field ofChinese epistemic modality is larger than that of English epistemic modal words;second, in terms of the speaker’s degree of participation, Chinese speaker’s degreeof involvement is higher than that of English speaker; at last the differencesbetween English and Chinese polite expressions are compared.Based on the existing relevant materials and researches, combined with therelevant knowledge from syntax, semantics, cognitive linguistics, pragmatics andso on, this thesis makes an attempt to compare the similarity and differences of Chinese and English epistemic modality and come to some conclusions and lay afoundation for further study in the future.