An Analysis Of The Interpersonal Meaning Of Modal Adjuncts In Commencement Speech

As one type of modal expressions,modal adjunct does not have the potential to be the Subject in a sentence and it is largely composed of adverbials and prepositional expressions.According to Halliday,modal adjunct can be divided into mood adjunct and comment adjunct.Mood adjunct is composed of adjunct of temporality,adjunct of modality and adjunct of mood.Although modal adjuncts are widely used in types of discourse,scholars often do not address modal adjunct specially,but give it one dimension in the classification of modal expression.The study of public speaking has been analyzed by many linguists but most of the studies are mainly applied to political speech and advertisement with little attention attached to commencement speech.In discourse analysis,it is believed that interpersonal metafunction is mainly realized by the system of modality.This thesis tries to elaborate on the interpersonal meaning of modal adjuncts in 12 commencement speeches.According to the analysis,it is found that mood adjunct is more employed than comment adjunct;in mood adjunct,adjunct of modality and adjunct of mood occur more frequently than adjunct of temporality;and high value modal adjuncts are more preferred in realizing interpersonal metafunction.And this kind of result has some relations with subjectivity.The findings prove the possibility of modal adjunct in realizing interpersonal meaning in theory and in practice.And it also provides an example for interpersonal meaning analysis of specific discourse.