| Modality is a complex but basic category, which plays an important role in language. It immediately expresses the speaker’s attitude towards, or assessment of what he is saying. Modality is helpful to communications among people and maintenance of their relationships. In daily speech modal expressions can be found everywhere. Making a comprehensive survey on the English modal system, there are a variety of modals that are used to express different modal meanings. The essence of modality is to adjust the degree of factuality of the predicate verb’s occurrence or existence, rather than to assume the identity of the sentence’s predicate verb. The subjective and objective world we live in is a unity of discreteness and continuity. When people describe a situation in the objective world, they are always wandering in two extremes: one is the objective positive pole and the other is the objective negative pole. Between the positive and negative poles, there exist amount of human’s subjective cognitive states of objective things. This should be a gradience continuum. In fact, often in actual communications, we reach different degrees of certainty about the factuality of what we say. This thesis, from the cognitive perspective, constructed semantic representation continuum of English modality, centering on English modal verbs which are the most principal means to express English modality.This thesis consists of six parts. The structure is as followed: Chapter One is introduction, which briefly introduced the background, theories, methods, findings, and significance of this study. Chapter Two is literature review, which from different perspectives summarized the achievements and limitations of foreign and domestic studies on modality and their enlightment for this study. Chapter Three is theoretical basis, which focused on the theories of categorization and decategorization and discussed the categorical features and decategorical features of modality. Chapter Four is the main part, which is also the core of this thesis. It firstly categorized modality into deontic modality, dynamic modality, and epistemic modality. Then, it respectively analyzed the typical English modal verbs in deontic modality category, dynamic modality category, and epistemic modality category and constructed three separate semantic representation continuums: semantic representation continuum of deontic modality is established according to the strength of the speaker’s directive attitude towards an action; semantic representation continuum of dynamic modality is established according to the strength of the intrinsic potentiality arising from a thing or circumstances; semantic representation continuum of epistemic modality is established according to the strength of the speaker’s certainty for what he says. And then, on the basis of the previous concrete analysis of modal meanings and the theory of decategorization, it construed polysemy of English modality. At last, synthesizing the above three semantic representation continuums, it constructed a whole semantic representation continuum of English modality according to the different degrees of semantic factuality. Chapter Five is application, which touched upon the problems existing in modern English modality teaching and expounded how the semantic representation continuum of English modality that has been constructed applies to English teaching and learning. The last part is conclusion, which summarized the study of this thesis and proposed the contributions, deficiencies, and future improvement of the study.This study will provide an effective method for the acquisition of English modal semantic representation. It can eliminate the polysemy problem in modal expressions and avoid misunderstanding. Meanwhile, this study will also play a promoting effect on semantic representation teaching of English modality. It can make students master English modal semantic representation effectively and acquire the target language more accurately. |
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