| Language, as a special social phenomenon, is the product of a society. Halliday argues that language has three metafunctions, namely, ideational function,interpersonal function and textual function. As one of the primary devices realizing the interpersonal function within systemic-functional linguistics, modality has long been a hot research subject that many scholars are interested in. Modality expresses a speaker’s subjective judgment which serves as a main means that expresses a speaker’s opinion and attitude. And it also can be seen as a speaker or a writer’s stance towards what is being exchanged and it is a common feature in most of the utterance and discourse.In recent years, with the appearance of corpus and prosperous development of discourse analysis, more and more researchers tend to study a certain form of discourse by means of corpus, with news discourse being one of them. The news, a special form of discourse, can easily influence people’s emotion and evaluation.Although its characteristics require the reported messages to be objective and fair,there is no absolute objectivity. Functional linguists hold that modality serves as an important means for news reporters or writers to inject personal subjective attitude,thereby attempting to exert influence on readers so that the readers could accept or agree with their viewpoints. However, at present, it is still far from enough for researchers to break through the previous study on finite modal operators and turn to study a much larger modality system, which is combined with news discourse in virtue of corpus.This thesis aims to conduct a systematic analysis of modality type, value and orientation under the framework of Halliday’s systemic-functional grammar and Perkins’ s modal expressions of modality in order to explore the interpersonal meanings of modality in English news discourse. The linguistic data is drawn from America’s The New York Times and The Washington Post as well as Britain’s The Guardian, among which 30 pieces of news discourse in all are selected to establish a small type of corpus. All the 30 pieces of news discourse are taken from thenewspapers in January of 2016, with ten samples from each. Meanwhile, both qualitative and quantitative research methods are adopted to discover the distribution of modality in news discourse and its interpersonal meanings, and hence to deepen people’s cognition and understanding on news discourse.Finally, the research demonstrates that news reporters or writers are more likely to use median value of modality and implicit subjective orientation to express their or others’ opinions. Finite modal operator and modal adjunct are the most frequently used modals. In addition, the distribution of modality and its modal expressions also reflect different interpersonal function. |
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